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 Afrocentrism
Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes

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STEPHEN HOWE

VERSO
London
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New York
 First published by Verso 1998
© Stephen Howe 199%
Paperback edition first published by Verso 1999
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 Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Acknowledgements
A Note on Language, Terminology and Sources xi

Introduction

PART ONE ANCESTORS AND INFLUENCES

1 Race: What’s in a Name? 19

2 Pan-Africanism and Négritude 23

3 African Origins and the Claim of Primacy 28

4 Diasporic Images of Africa before Afrocentrism 35

5 The Birth of Afrocentrism 59

6 The Masonic Connection 66

7 Caribbean Currents 73

8 Afro-America as Nation, and as Internal Colony 87

9 African Cultures and the New World 101

PART TWO VISIONS OF HISTORY

10 Hamites, Semites and Statue-Stealers Lid

{1 The Lure of Egypt 122

12) Nubia and ‘Inner Africa’: the Ideological Uses of African

State-Building 138
iv CONTENTS

13 African Unity and African Philosophy

14 Cheikh Anta Diop
—wt Martin Bernal

PART THREE AFROCENTRISM IN THE PRESENT

16 Wild Afrocentricity
17 Molefi Asante: Godfather of Afrocentrism

18 The Network, the School and the Fellow-Travellers

19 Afrocentrism and Science

20 Psychology, Race and Magic Melanin

21 Polemics and Prejudices: Sex, Race, Religion and Afrocentrism

Bibliography
Index
 Preface to the Paperback Edition

The paperback publication of Afrocentrism does not allow of substantial

updating or revision to the main text —

which perhaps in any case be
would

premature. It does, however, enable me to comment bricfly on some carly

responses to the book, and to note a few especially important new

developments relevant to its themes.

writer whom I discuss crilically but, I
One pioneer Afrocentric hope,
Henrik Clarke, has publi- since first
respectfully below, John passed away
cation. Many of Clarke's ideas were, as I have suggested, exaggerated or

wrong; but his life ~

a
story of determined struggle against poverty and dis-
crimination —
should be saluted. Meanwhile, another writer whose views I
criticise sharply
very here was, even before
press, the first edition went to

embroiled very public controversy

in over
alleged personaland academic
improprieties leaving a legacy of enduring turmoil
—
in the university
department where he works. Several readers have asked why A/rocentrism
did not refer to those disputes. The reason is simple: am concerned with
that individual’s shoddy ideas, not his allegedly shoddy personal behaviour.
Pre-eminent among the new
publications in the field is Afrotopia: The
Roots of African American Popular History, by Wilson Jeremiah Moses

(Cambridge, 1998). Its main theme is the ‘prehistory’ of Afrocentrism, in

the thought of various nineteenth and early twentieth century Afro-
American writers: something which I could treat only briefly below. Moses,
as the foremost living authority on African-American intellectual history,
also brings to this subject a far greater weight of scholarship than J could
ever claim. He identifies it as
extending even further back in time than |
or others had thought: the earliest clear examples of black American
‘Africanist’ writing I had known of were from the 1820s, but Moses finds
in the 1790s. He also suggests that, although a very wide range
precursors
of influences fed into
nincteenth-century Afrocentrism, including mystical
and Masonic latter’s
ones, importance has been exaggerated, and that
the
the most significant input came from fundamentalist Christianity. This is a
revision which Iam happy to accept.
Moses also argues for a more nuanced and in part sympathetic appraisal
of the romantic Afrocentrist tradition than I or most other commentators
 PREFACE
vi
have done. While rejecting and opposing the claims of Afrocentrism to lit-
eral historical truth, and especially attempts to present it as such in the
schoolroom and in academia, he suggests that we should recognise and

respect its often bencficial social functions. T had given brief consideration
to such claims (see esp. pp. 4-6 below), but clearly there is a wider debate
to be had here, on the social and psychological uses of historical myth -
a

debate in which political theorists like David Archard and David Miller
have also recently been cngaged, but which goes far beyond the remit of
this book.
Among major new writings by Afrocentrists themselves, the most sub-
stantial is
perhaps Richard Poe’s Black Spark, White Fire (Rocklin, CA, 1997).
Though atypical of the genre in being the product of a white author, it is
characteristic in its uneasy blending of history and mythography. On the
one hand, Poe includes thoughtful and balanced discussion of the role of
race in ancient history. On the other, he displays the utmost credulity
towards eccentric theories on the ‘secret history’ of Freemasonry, the

Knights Templar and so on.

A mass of new research naturally continues to appear on such themes as

the ancient history and including Egypt and Nubia:

archacology of Africa,
a literature far too extensive even to be listed here,
thoughespecially rele-
vant and noteworthy is Christopher Ehret’s pioneering survey of eastern
Africa’s ancient history, An African Classical Age (Charlottesville, VA, 1998).
In relation to my book’s brief discussion of the Nation of Islam andi its

pseudo-historical teachings, mention should be made of Claude Andrew

Clegg IPs fine biography of Elijah Muhammad: An Orgemal Man (New

York, 1998). More generally, my unavoidably peremptory claims about cul-
tural universalism and particularism, especially with reference to debates
on African philosophy and ‘personality’ (for example at pp.1 1-12 and
156-62 below), can perhaps usefully be compared with Kwasi Wiredu’s
extended discussion of such matters in his Cultural Universals and
Particulars: African Perspectroe (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996).
An
Wiredu argues, with far greater authority than I could, that there are

important cultural universals, as

applicable to Africa as to anywhere else.
Of the works which had already appeared when Afroceninrismwent to

press, but which [ had unaccountably missed, special mention should be

made of Francois-Xavier Fauvelle’s L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop: Histoire et
idéologie (Paris 1996). Concentrating on
Diop’s carly work, Fauvelle clis-
cusses this in far greater depth and detail than Thad space to do; but comes

to very similar conclusions (o mine about both the strengths and the weak-
nesses of that work.
Mention of Fauvelle’s excellent book poimts towards a wider omission in
mine, which can
only be noted, not remedicd, here: lack of attention to

Francophone African scholarship, including the influence of Diopian

ideas there. Though [I would stick by my main suggestion (pp.181-3
below), that this influence has been very restricted in terms of substantial
historical work, there has perhaps been a more
important legacy, in terms
 PREFACE vii

of the wider cultural milieu, than I had allowed for. Something similar
might be true -

or
might become truc in future —

in South Africa. It has

been intriguing, during 1998, to find so influential a
political analyst as
Mahmood Mamdani of Cape Town urging (in as yet unpublished lec-
tures) the rehabilitation of Diop’s ideas, and their insertion as a founda-
tion stone for African studies in the new South Africa, on the grounds of
their providing a millennia-long, grand narrative of African development.
Some friendly critics of my book have suggested that more attention
should be given to the relations between Afrocentric historiography and
the phenomena of relativist historical The implication is
that Afrocentrism should
philosophies.
be viewed in the context of post-
apparently
modernist, poststructuralist, post-Marxist. and/or discourse—analytical
theories. One can see why this is thought to be so. Several other modern
currents of writing about history have indeed sought to link the critique
of Eurocentrism, colonialism and racism with such approaches: to sug-
gest, for instance, an intimate and even necessary association among post-
structuralist, postmodernist and
postcolonial theorics. In a sense, my own

interest in Afrocentric history-writing began as an

outgrowth of thinking
about those arguments: I have addressed them more
directly in several
recent and forthcoming in contexts as diverse as the histori-
publications, But actu- |
ographies of Ireland, the Middle Kast and postcolonial studies.
ally, as I have suggested below, the relationship has, so far at least, not

been at all close. Afrocentrists do not, by and large, proclaim relativism,

but that they are
recovering the truth of African history from others’
or lies; and they tend to have a
strong taste for the kinds of
mythmaking
metahistorical narrative which
sweeping, postmodernism ostensibly
rejects. Specifically postmodernist or relativist claims have been almost
entirely absent from Afrocentric writing.
In the months since Afrocentrism’s first publication, I have received
much comment in personal communications as well as pub-
lished
thoughttul
reviews: for those concerned to be thanked
too many individually
here. ]am, however, especially grateful to Dr Shomarka Keita, who was
kind enough to send me detailed comments and several of his published
and unpublished articles, and subsequently found time to discuss our

shared interests in a dialogue which | hope will continue.

L have also, naturally, discussed the book’s claims in various academic,
public and media presentations and debates. My thanks to those who

sponsored, facilitated or contributed constructively to such debates,

especially Peter Jenkins and the staff of the Africa Centre in London,
Shula Marks, Richard Rathbone, and Pascoe Sawyers. It must, however,
be said that I found aspects of some of these debates thoroughly depress-
ing, with many of my Afrocentric interlocutors seemingly unable or

unwilling to respond to what I had actually written. Some had, clearly

and simply, not read it before attacking; others refused, for instance, to

between views I advancing, and those I quoted others as

distinguish was

holding.
 PREFACE
viii
Perhaps most disconcerting, many of the Afrocentrisis with whom I have
discussed these issues appear not to have read, or sometimes even heard of,
any writers on Africa other than those in their own romantic vindicationist
tradition. Thus when one suggests to them that in arguing against the views
of Cheikh Anta Diop or Molefi Asante, onc is arguing for the ideas not of
some
shadowy and outdated Eurocentric vision, but of Ade Ajayi or Valentin
Mudimbe, Kwame Appiah or Kwasi Wiredu, Elikia M’Bokolo or
Basscy
Andah, the point seems not to be understood —

for such writers’ works, or

those of almost any living African scholar, are not known in these circles.
In part, too, the selfisolation of the romantic Afrocentrist discourse is
attributable to the very nature of the beliefs about an essentialized ‘African

personality’ that are characteristically held. Here, perhaps, one recent con-

versation | have had with a

young black British critic can stand in for many
similar debates. She was almost pitying about my supposed, and in her view

genctically determined, cultural blindness. could not possibly understand

Afrocentrism or Africa because, as a
‘European’, my mind is inherently
cold, calculating, individualistic and materialist. She, as an ‘African’
(whose voice was, of course, pure south London, while several generations
of her ancestors will have spoken in the cadences of the Caribbean), was

naturally intuitive, spiritual and communal-minded. Her prime example of

Africans’ alleged antimaterialism was that, so she claimed, Africa's gold-
mines were never
exploited for gain before the European conquerors
arrived. So, I naturally asked, how come there was a trade in gold out of
West Africa long before the colonial cra? That, came the response, was the

responsibility not of Africans but of Arabs ~

who, in some Afrocentrists’

eyes, are of course even

greater historic villains than (he Europeans. Even
if there had been time to answer
properly, I would hardly have known
where to begin. How can one
argue with somcone who claims to be almost

mystically attuned to the African past, but does not know of West Affrica’s
intricate and far-reaching networks of trade, its long tradition of magnifi-
cent artworks in gold, or even the claborate system of goldweights devel-

oped by the Ashanti and other peoples, which not only demonstrate the

precision with which they managed the business of gold trading, but are

often superb miniature works of art in their own

right?
In thus refusing to read or listen to people from outside the ranks of

already approved writers, romantic Afrocentrists greatly resemble not only

devotees of fundamentalist religion, but also a certain kind of dogmatic
Marxist which is now rarer than it once was. The obvious hope must be that
to serious
—

just as tended to happen with many people first introduced

reading through one or other Leninist sect younger aficionados of —

‘strong’ Afrocentrism will often become dissatisfied with the restricted

intellectual diet available within the fold, and begin to range more widely.
That is certainly my hope.

Slephen Howe
Oxford, February 1999
 PREFACI ix

1. See for instance my ‘David Fieldhouse and “Imperialism”: Some Historiographical

Revisions’, in Peter Burroughs and AJ. Stockwell (eds), Managing the Business of empire
(London, 1998); ‘The Politics of Historical “Revisionism”: Comparing Ireland and
Israel/Palestine’ (forthcoming m Past and Present), and Ireland and Empire: Colonial
Histories, Legacies and Lmages in Irish Politics and Cultire (forthcommg, Oxford, 1999).
 Acknowledgements

My thanks for advice, guidance and/or invaluable criticisin of earlier drafts

to Kwame Anthony Appiah, Neil Belton, Robin Blackburn, Sebastian
Budgen, Michael Francis, Paul Gilroy, Sart Horwitz, Marek Kohn, Shehu
Othman, Michael Rosen, Sariel Shalev, John Sutton, Boyd Tonkin, Daphna
Vardi, Lindsay Waters, Robert Young. None of them is responsible for my
errors of fact, interpretation or
judgement.
Thanks also to the staffs of the Bodleian Library, Ashmolean Museum,
Radcliffe Science Library, Institute of Anthropology, Nuffield College and
Ruskin College libraries, Oxford; the British Library, London; the Schom-

burg Center for Research in Black Culture and New York Public Library,
New York.
 A Note on
Language,
Terminology and Sources

The preferred terms for various racially defined groups in American society
have shifted several times in recent decades —

most obviously, the

changes
from ‘Negro’ to ‘black’ (or ‘Black’; some
people thinking the capitalization
important, for rather unclear reasons) to ‘African-American’ or sometimes
‘Afro-American’. | think people should usually be called whatever they
prefer to be called, and many of the writers discussed in these pages have a

very strong, principled preference for ‘African-American’. On the other

hand, all else being equal, one syllable is better than seven; and opinion
polls have shown clear majoritics of African-descended Americans. still
preferring the older label ‘black’. Meanwhile, ironically, even the house
magazine of the Afrocentric movement is still
called the Journal of Black
Studies, and its editor has writtenhighly publicized articles in what continued
to be entitled the Journal of Negro Education. 1 have used ‘black’, ‘Afro-
American’ and ‘African-American’ interchangeably, if only to avoid mono-

tony, while mainly according with the last preference. When discussing
earlier writings tn which the term ‘Negro’ is used, I have retained those
writers’ language: to modernize it would be to distort their contexts and
intentions, since the subtle relationships among the terms
‘Negro’, ‘black’,
‘African’ and ‘Ethiopian’ in many ninetcenth-century Afro-American texts,
for instance, are
important to an understanding of their messages.
Many of the writers discussed here refer to Pharaonic Egypt by the name
‘Kemet’ or ‘Kemit, while Yosef Ben-Jochannen prefers “Ta-Merry’ and
Henry Olela ‘Sais’; all renderings, supposedly, of ancient Egyptians’ own
names for their land. There are
good reasons for such usages but those —

reasons would apply equally to calling modern Egypt ‘Misr’, Germany

‘Deutschland’, and so on. (In fact, they would apply at least equally, since
Ben-Jochannen’s and Olela’s terms are idiosyncratic to say the least.) In the
interests of accessibility, | have kept the name
Egypt for both the ancient
and the modern states occupying roughly the same
geographical area.
Amitav Ghosh has argued that use of the name
Egypt is particularly
inappropriate —
he calls it ‘almost as much a
weapon as a word’ (1992: 33)
~
because of its association with a range of pejorative phrases. The tags he
cites, however, are not only long vanished from popular usage, but had
xii AFROCENTRISM

nothing to do with the place itself all derived from sixteenth-century

English attitudes to Roma or
gypsies, whose association with Egypt was
simply a matter of erroncous theories about their origins. To underline how
ideologically charged the issue is, it might be noted that allegedly, when
ancient historian James Muhly made the same point about use of ‘Kemet’
that I have just made, at a 1991 Temple University conference on Martin
Bernal’s Black Athena, he was booed by the audience (M. Levine 1992a:
451).
Dating is also potentially controversial. I use what seems the most neutral
accessible form: ce (which can, according to taste, stand for ‘Christian Era’
or ‘Common Era’) rather than ap, and scEe (Before Christian/Common
Era) rather than Bc.

Also for reasons of

accessibility, | refer almost exclusively, and wherever
possible, to works in
English even where, as with the important writings of
—

Cheikh Anta Diop, original publication was in French. I make reference,

however, to a handful of particularly important, untranslated, works in

French and German. In these cases translations of quoted passages are my

own.

Many people prefer to put the term ‘race’ in scare quotes, denoting the
belief that it refers nothing real but, rather, to an undefinable,
to artificial
and almost always pernicious imaginative construct. I agree with them, but
will in these pages be discussing numerous writers who do not. Since [am
talking about their ideas, and certainly not proposing a theory of race of my
own, Lomit the scare quotes. Imagine them if you like.
 Introduction

If somebody uses tradition as a way of limiting your choices, in a

way that’s as racist as

saying you have to sit at the back of the bus.
Anthony Davis, quoted in Lock (1988: 1)

Afro-American pianist and composer Davis was

thinking primarily of those
critics and music
industry inoguls mostly —
white -
who seek to block black
artistic creativity by imposing restrictive, monolithic or romanticized notions
of jazz or blues tradition on African-American music. But his complaint
applies powerfully to important modern currents in Afro-American thought.
For a mystical, essentialist, irrationalist and often, in the end, racist set of
doctrines has arisen, out of the cultural nationalist milieu, to
occupy centre

ground of media attention in relation to black American thinking. The self-

ascribed or
preferred label for these doctrines is Afrocentricity, or
'
Afrocentrism.
Afrocentrism may, in its looser sense or more moderate forms, mean little
more than an
emphasis on shared African origins among all ‘black’ people,
taking a
pride in those origins and an interest m African history and culture
-
or those aspects of New World cultures seen as
representing African
‘survivals’ -

and a belief that Eurocentric bias has blocked or distorted

knowledge of Africans and their cultures. In this broad sense, a very great
deal of the cultural and intellectual history of African-descended
peoples
throughout the Americas and, indeed, the world could be thought of as
‘Afrocentric’ —

interest in these themes can be documented throughout

those histories. It has had its European impact too especially, of course,
—

of Afro-Caribbean descent but also,

among
enthusiasm
communities
for black
notably,through
whites.*
But its stronger which
diasporicmusics among
have
many
in be
versions, recent to

ascendant
in

and to have arrogated the ‘Afrocentric’

appeared
label to themselves,
years
a far
more dogmatic and essentially irrational
cohesive, ideology becomes cvi-
dent. It
provides a direct analogue to the extreme forms of cultural
nationalism, premised on beliefs about race, which flourished in nineteenth-
century Europe. In this aspect it reproduces all the essential features of what
Walker Connor influentially baptized ‘ethnonationalism’ (Connor 1994);

1
2 AFROGENTRISM

though there is —
as we shall also see below —
extreme vagueness over who
or what exactly comprises the ‘nation’ in question, Like nineteenth-century
European cthnonationalism, or that evident among some 1930s Germans
and 1990s Serbs, ‘strong’ Afrocentrism is accompanied by a mass of invented
traditions, by a mythical vision of the past, and by a body of racial pseudo-
science, in this case much of it centred on
grotesque ideas about the skin-

colouring chemical melanin.

From all this
follows extreme mtellectual and cultural separatism, involy-
ing belief fundamentally distinct
in and internally homogeneous ‘African’
ways of knowing and feeling about the world, ways which only members of
the group can
possibly understand. Even those who are
apparently in-group
members, by birth, ancestry or pigmentation, can be exchided from it on

ideological grounds if they fail to accept the ideology’s doctrines; for such
failure can be attributed, quite simply, to brainwashing by the dominant
Eurocentric culture. Thus the belief system is insulated from the possibility
of critique or falsification.
Outside the USA, such views have been gaining increasing salience in
Britain, Canada, France, and even in some parts of Africa itself: though it is

striking and important that what Americans call Afrocentrism is not

especially popular among continental or

non-diasporic African intellectuals.
It is perhaps more clearly recognized by many of them than it is by some in

Europe and North America that Afrocentrism in the contemporary, narrow

US sense is largely a deviation or

degeneration from the wider tradition of
the politics of liberation: perhaps more an index of frustration than of

progress.
For the historian, there are at least three clusters of issues here, clearly
distinct from one another though also
conceptually and, even more,

politically related. They are, first, questions about the history of Africa,
especially about the degree of cultural unity across the African landmass
and the relationship between ancient Egyptian civilization and other states

and cultures on the continent. Second, issues around the role of African

peoples origins and developmen. of diverse

in the ideas, practices and
technologies generally recognized as
being of global significance: Egypt,
and especially its putative influence on ancient Greece, is again central
here. Third, controversies about the extent and nature of African influences
m what
i is often now called the ‘African diaspora’; controversies which have
been especially salient in relation to the United States, have interacted
heavily with sensitive issues of current public policy, and involve questions
both wide and fundamental about contemporary US politics and culture.
In general terms, relationships among these three sets of issues would be
of interest to anyone who is curious about history, anyone who takes
pleasure in looking at patterns of historical change and the
interaction of
long-term
and traditions the of
regions cultures, across great swecp
human development. That curiosity and pleasure are (he main motivations
for my inquiry here. The story of Afrocentrism and its ancestors is a

fascinating chapter in the history of ideas, whatever clse it may be. The
 INTRODUCTION 3

intrinsic interest of the questions raised compensates, in part, for the

depression induced by a more particular, perhaps urgent, more directly

political reason for linking the three spheres of concern. This more urgent
political reason is that disputes over African history, over the sources of a
bundle of attributes labelled ‘civilization’, and over the character of ethnic
cultures in diverse North American and other societies, have all been linked
in violent argument around what is now called Afrocentrism.
All these matters have, in the past few years, been raised with especial
acuity in the USA. There, they have become central to the storm over

multiculturalism and so-called Political Correctness in education, media,

government policies, and in the public sphere quite generally. Public

controversy has centred particularly around the inroads Afrocentrism has

made into schoollevel education in the USA. By 1991, it was
reported,
roughly 350 private schools or ‘Afrocentric academies’ devoted to the

approach had been established, educating more than 50,000 children, The
number has continued to grow. Numerous public school authorities have
also introduced Afrocentric curricula, including wholly ‘Afrocentric schools’
in predominantly black districts, as Detroit, Balttmore and Milwaukee had
done (Marable 1993: 120). Elsewhere, curriculum reform designed to
introduce Afrocentric perspectives produced national-level public storms
and political battles, as in New York and
Washington, DC. A first generation
of explicitly Afrocentric school textbooks has begun to appear (e.g. Asante
1995a, b; C. Crawford 1996; Rashidi 1992).°
The disputes have given rise
including to a massive polemical literature,
such bestsellers as Dinesh D’Souza’s
of Racism, [liberal Education and The End
Robert Hughes's Culture of Complamt and Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting
of America, Yet US debate over
everything from Frederick Douglass's
autobiographies to rap lyrics has been persistently parochial, mistaking for
American phenomena what are actually much wider ones. The ‘culture
wars’ of recent years in the USA have, to a quite astonishing degree, been
almost exclusively focused around rival versions of Americanism; even —

or

perhaps especially
-

when some
protagonists have been proclaiming their
‘Africanism’, Advocacy and criticism of educational ‘multiculturalism’ have

rarely been about what schoolchildren and students should know of the
world, but about what they should be taught of the histories and beliefs of
various social groups in the USA’s own
population. It is the “We Are the
World’ syndrome, with a
vengeance.
Necessarily, what follows here focuses heavily on those American disputes
~

though, unlike almost all the vast outpouring of words in the United States
on these questions, I also give substantial attention to related themes in

European and, above all, in African controversies. This is, in part, to register
a
protest and to indicate an alternative. As writers like Robert Farris

Thompson and, more recently, Paul Gilroy have shown, the ideas and
cultural forms of black communities —
like those of other ethnic formations
~

on all the shores of the Adantic have composcd a

single story, an claborate

pattern of call and response. This makes a nonsense of the national

4 AFROCENTRISM

frameworks within which black culture usually discussed.

history
are and
And that pattern in its turn influentially intertwined
is far more with the
central themes of Euro-American modernity than is ordinarily thought:
which means that dominant discourses about Europeanism, Englishness,
Americanism, modernism and postmodernism —

with their mirror-image,

currently fashionable ‘Afrocentric’ theories —

also need drastic revision.

Much the same is true of the Mediterranean world, three thousand years
as well as today. ‘Black Athena’ is a
slogan just as false to history as is
ago
‘White Egypt’.
In what follows, I have tried to show that the views of writers usually
labelled Afrocentric are
largely erroneous, in part by comparing them

against the opinions on the same

subjects of various other writers, What
matters to me —

and, I hope, to almost all readers —

is that the writers whose

views I prefer are more
expert in their subjects, more careful and coherent
in their arguments, offer more and better evidence and higher standards of

clarity and logic in pursuit of the beliefs they advance, than their opponents.
Some, however, will think that it is more
important that those I judge
negatively are mostly —

though very far from all ~

of at least partial African
descent, while those I assess more favourably are often of European or Euro-
American origin: though very many are not, and in some cases I am
quite
ignorant and happily uncurious about their ancestry or skin colour, Those
who are fixated on the view that racial or ethnic origin inevitably dictates
intellectual will doubt therefore dismiss the ideas of many of
position no

these authors, and will dismiss mine for the same reason. So be it: that

fundamentally racist attitude to intellectual inquiry is, as I shall argue, the

most basic of all the faults in the work I examine, and judge negatively, in
the following pages.
Yet by no means all, or
against all the
even most, of these charges stick
writers analyseI here. Some genuine and
of them seem to me to have made
crucial contributions to knowledge, and to political enlightenment. The
works of Cheikh Anta Diop, St Clair Drake and Martin Bernai, in particular,
have power and importance for their negative critique of European colonial
arrogance and its latter-day legacies. They remain significant for that
necessary debunking function, even if there are
grave problems with the
positive cases which these authors offer to replace the views they assail.
Much of the earlier historical writing by African-Americans within what has
been called the ‘vindicationist’ tradition (Drake 1987: xv-l) can be
defended grounds. Even where
on similar the authors made what now

inaccurate exaggerated claims about black and African

appear quite or

achievement, they provided an impassioned corrective to Euro-American

and European disparagement. As such, writing like this takes ils place in the

long history of intellectual decolonization of which Edward Said has written

movingly in his Calture and Imperialism and elsewhere, and of which Said’s
own works are among the most distinguished modern examples.
I do not seek to imply that all, or even most, Afrocentric writers are

deliberate intellectual frauds though I think some certainly are.

-

More,
 INTRODUCTION 5

probably, sincerely believe in the ideas they propound, or think that the
political or
psychological usefulness of those ideas outweighs their often
dubious intrinsic merit, or
adopt some mixture of those two stances. The
latter -
the belief that howeverquestionable the claims about history,
culture, collective psychology or science made by Afrocentrists, they have
positive confidence-building or
identity-alfirming functions would be, if it -

were true, the strongest defence of the movement. The prominent African-
American historian Wilson J. Moses has suggested something of the sort:
‘Like most mythologies, it is only half believed and simply represents an

attempt on the part of respectable, honest people to create a

positive folk
mythology’ (quoted in G. Thomas 1995: 28). One can certainly accept that
morc-or-less honest people, in their capacity as political activists, might seck
to build a
positive folk mythology which encourages those they wish to
mobilize even
—
if they do not wholly believe in the propositions they
advance. It is less clear whether honest ‘fellectuals can
properly behave in
such a way, using their university posts, editorships, classroom or media
access and the apparatus of scholarship to do so; still less whether such a

stance is compatible with the insistent claims of most Afrocentrists that they
are
recoveringthe truth of African history from others’ mythmaking that
—

they are pioneering a new scholarly discipline, or even a science.

More importantly, however, I do not think that the faith in the political
or
psychological benefits of false ‘folk mythologies’ is justified, It depends
beliefs: that false and mythicized
on two ideas can even in principle
—

—be
politically capacitating, and that the particular false ideas propounded by
Afrocentrists can have positive political consequences under the particular
circumstances in which they are propounded. The first, | think, would be
true of Afrocentrism only if politics were always and only a zero-sum game
(if ‘we’ win, ‘you’ must necessarily lose) setting ethnic or racial collectivities
against one another. This is not the case, even in the contemporary USA:
j is, at the least, a great deal complicated than that. Presenting
politics
it in terms
more

of such grand simplicities is of advantage only to a few individuals,

who can gain influence by claiming to speak for the ‘imagined communities’
whose leaders they pretend to be. The second is in my view also false, for
reasons which will be explained further on, but which come down to the
observation that Afro-America’s problems are above all problems of econ-
omic deprivation, and cannot be remedied by approaches which entirely
ignore economics, This is still more true of Africa itself.
Tam unconvinced, therefore, by the widely voiced claims that Afrocentr-
ism perhaps especially
—
at the level of high-school education -
is of

psychological, cultural or
political benefit to African-Americans, providing
resources to combat racism and other disabiliues under which they labour.
Its characteristic emphases scem to me, on the contrary, often to be barriers
to or
cligressions from
development the strategies against racism of effective
and social justice. It might, of course,
for still be
thought that Afrocentrism
is
primarily a cultural or
psychological phenomenon rather than an

intellectual or pedagogic onc. On some levels this is certainly true, notably

6 AFROCENTRISM

for such ideas’ influence in popular culture (for instance in rap music).
However, these aspects are not my main focus here. Whatever else it: may

be, Afrocentrism is aso an educational and intellectual movement, whose

proponents make very strong claims about the truth-valuc of their ideas:

especially their ideas about history, but also about psychology, anthropology
and various natural sciences. Indeed, their characteristic stance, far from

asserting that they

putting are psychologically capacitating forward useful or

myths (as diagnosis would imply), is to say that their views represent
Moses’s
the true historical reality, long suppressed and concealed by European
racist misconceptions or lies. As Gerald Early perceptively points out,
Afrocentrism resembles many earlicr nationalist ideologies in being:

the orthodoxy of the books ... an

attempt to wed knowledge and ideology.
Movements like Afrocentrism, which feels both its mission and its authority
hinge on the revelation of a denied and buried truth, promote a fervent
scholasticism, a hermencutical ardor among true believers for
compilations
of historical minutiae on the one hand, and for grand philosophical tracts
on the other. (1995: 34)4

It is on that level, the level of the truth-value of Afrocentric claims, that I

seek primarily to assess the movement.

In the end, indeed, I believe that most of the arguments about the
racialization of scholarship, proposed in recent years from a wide range of
perspectives, are an evasion of or a distraction from scrious political issues
in relation to Africa
diaspora, and its anywhere else. To as much as for
observe scholarly perspectives on African
that and diasporic societies have
been massively influenced by racial idcology is one thing, and is obviously
true. To analyse those histories of racialized scholarship, and to trace the
ways in which writers’ own ethnic origins have influenced their views, are

important and fascinating tasks. But it is quite another thing to believe that
such analyses offer significant aid in solving contemporary political or
economic problems let alone to think
—
that the erection of counter-myths
about African racial superiority or a unitary, transhistorical ‘black perspec-
tive’ does so. At the height of the bitter battles in the American African
Studies Association (battles which play a walk-on part in the story told here)
Pierre L. van den Berghe pointed out overgeneralizing in his anger, but —

with, I believe, an essential, powerful truth that: —

The African peasant does not care one whit whether his oppressor is white
or black.
Rightly, he does not consider ‘race’ relevant. It should be a matter

of deepest shame to us ‘intellectuals’ that we still talk as if it were relevant.

(1970; 336)*

If anything, that is even more true today than it was over

twenty-five years
ago.
It should hardly be necessary to say that all these traits can be found
 INTRODUCTION 7

paralleled in many other parts of the world, and among many US groups
other than African-Americans. Indecd, they scem
ubiquitous wherever

history is pressed into service in ethnic contestation. There is no intention

bere of seeking to imply that mostly the analysed are Afro-American writers

uniquely blameworthy, or that African-American culture is somehow more

credulously disposed than any other towards mythicized self-legitimation,

racially charged fantasies of origin or mystical pseudo-history.
Every intellectual failing identified in this book has its parallels elsewhere:
often parallels that have done or could do vastly greater political damage
than those that are popular in some sections of the African-American public
sphere. Virtually every European state and ethnic group has drawn on and
abused the discipline of archaeology in its search for historical roots, often

involving straightforwardly racist ideas about the origins and destiny of itself
and its neighbours (see, for example, Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996).
In the cases I know best, those of Britain and Ireland, very long histories of

utterly fantastic racial myth and ideas about the national pasts and origins
can be traced, involving all the clements of mysticism, claims of racial

primacy and superiority, and promiscuous borrowings from esoteric lore

and Masonic tradition which we shall observe operating in the African-
American case.° This was not just the preserve of mystics or irrationalists:
central figures of the European Enlightenment held not only racist ideas
but ideas which now
appear utterly grotesque about racial difference,
national character and human origins (see, for example, Eze 1996, 1997).
Nor is it merely a matter of the European past, of an intellectual stage now
transcended. The immense and gullible appetite of contemporary Euro-

peans and Euro-Americans for occult, irrational and fantastic ‘histories’ is

evident from the shelves of almost any bookstore, where such works

commonly command far more shelf space and greater sales than works of

genuine history. These works frequently revolve around many of the same

themes as those popular in romantic Afrocentrism: theories about the lost

wisdom of ancient civilizations, especially that of Egypt, bizarre claims about
the history of Freemasonry or Theosophism, stories of lost continents, and
so on. As we shall see, indeed, these are not only parallel but often
interconnected stories, with African-American vindicationists (and fantas-
ists) often drawing heavily on various earlier European racial theories and
bodies of esoteric thought. Perhaps the worst thing one could say of the
more eccentric African-American writers discussed below is (to adapt Mark
Twain on the Jews) that they've shown they can be just as bad as everybody
else.
Few, if any, of the polemicists who have assaulted Afrocentric and related
intellectual trends in the US ‘culture wars’ of recent years appear to have
read much —
or even
any
—
of the Afrocentrists’ work, Dinesh D’Souza
(L991), Arthur Schlesinger (1992), Robert Fhighes (1993), Richard Bern-
stein (1994) and others refer almost exclusively to newspaper reports on It,
rather than the writings themselves. Mass media attention to Afrocentrism
and associated beliefs can be said to have started with the polemical writings
8 AFROCENTRISM

of D’Souza, a young conservative journalist and researcher at the right-wing

think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, (The book which contributed
most to beginning the rather artificial controversy over
‘political correct-

ness’ in academe, Allan Bloom's Closeng of the American Mind [Bloom 1987],
had not specifically targeted Afrocentrism or Black Studies, though it had
bemoaned affirmative action programmes and separatist sentiment among
students.) Afrocentrism was only one of the targets of D’Souza’s freewhccl-

ing, often slapdash assault in MMiberal Education on multiculturalism, “political

correctness’, left-wing academia.
and He sneered at the young enthusiasts
at Howard University and elsewhere who were, in his terms, ‘in search of
Black Pharaohs’, but he did not look at their ideas cither closely or
fairly.
Soon thereafier, though, the distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesin-

ger Jr joined the fray with an equally polemical but more thoughtfully
argued book, The Disuniteng of America. Schlesinger mounted his critique
from the standpoint of a New Deal liberal as contrasted with D’Souza’s
neoconservatism, but he was no less hostile ‘eruption of ethnicity’
to the
(1992: 15) in the worlds of education and public policy. He believed that a

resurgent cthnocentrism in cultural politics threatened the allimportant

traditions of the USA as an integrationist melling-pot, especially in its
insistence on teaching history as ‘filopietistic commemoration’ (ibid. 99).
The result was to ‘sanction and deepen racial tensions’ (69) and threaten
equally the academic values of accuracy and objectivity, and the political
values of tolerance and liberalism. He placed Afrocentrism more firmly in
his sights than did D’Souza, secing it as representing many of the worst
excesses of the general cultural trends he deplored.
The noted art critic Robert Hughes went in, if anything, even harder;
though his Culture of Complaint (1993) has the merit of assaulting the

‘patriotically correct’ idiocies of the right as well as the ‘politically correct’

ones of the left. The Afrocentrists and allied trends, Hughes believes, ‘are
proposing, not an informed multiculturalism, but a blinkered and wildly

polemical separatism’ (ibid, 129), Hughes's notion of Afrocentric ideas, like

Schlesinger’s, is apparently based on an extremely narrow
reading. He cites
the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop and the British theorist Martin
Bernal, but very few other Afrocentric writers, and may too readily associate
Afrocentrism as a whole with the ravings of works favoured by the Nation of
Islam and by black anti-Semites, such as The /ceman Inheritance and The Secret

Relationship between Blacks and Jews (137-8, 143-4). In the end, Hughes
believes, Afrocentric beliefs ‘want to create a
separatist history and enforce
it.on kids who are still too young to dispute it, They amount to claims for

‘purely remedial history’ with ‘symbolic’ fiinctions: ‘part of a reaction of

despair, frustration and rage’, and part of a universal tendency of insurgent

nationalisins to fabricate myths about the past (148).
Another left-wing scholar and polemicist, the Afro-American political
scientist Manning Marable, has been almost equally harsh in his judgements.
Although Afrocentrism aims to provide the basis for an alternative world-
view and oppositional consciousness, he feels, it is essentially opposed to
 INTRODUCTION 9

pluralism and diversity, blind to issues of gender and social class, and
‘““freezes” the meaning of culture, reducing the dynamics and multiple
currents of interpersonal and group interaction to a
rigid set of ahistorical

categories’ (Marable 1995: 122). Marable is of the movement’s

he the that
suspicious
it is at least often white
exclusivism, though notes irony as

administrators and academics as black separatists who harbour the ‘hidden

assumption ... that no one who was not born black would have any reason
to cultivate a
scholarly interest or the proper dedication for the study of
black life and history’ (ibid.: 122-3). Above all, Afrocentrism’s neglect of
economic realities damns it in his eyes:

It looks to a romantic, mythical reconstruction of yesterday to find some

understanding of the cultural basis of today's racial and class challenges. Yet
that critical understanding reality begin of cannot with an examination of
the lives of Egyptian Pharaohs. It must begin by critiquing the vast structure

of power and privilege which characterizes the political economy of post-

industrial capitalist America. (1995: 200)

Dinesh D’Souza returned to the fray with The fend of Racism (1995). Here he
(or his research assistants) seemed to have read rather more widely than in

his earlier polemic, and the new book included a much more detailed exam-

ination of Afrocentrism, His treatment of the theme, however, still seemed

dominated by a desire
simple dismissal of Afrocentric
for ideas rather than

tracing their roots or evaluating their claims. The book also expresses
disconcertingly sharp prejudice and scorn towards African-American com-

munities. Its treatment of genetic differences between racial

is especially puzzling. D’Souza
alleged an extended and sympathetic précis of
groups
gives
the views of those who believe there are
significant inherited Inequalities of
intelligence, with African-Americans scoring markedly lower than Euro-

peans and Asians. Not only is his summary sympathetic: he distorts the
theories of Sandra Scarr and others to make them seem like clear-cut

proponents of such views, which they are not. Equally, he caricatures the

arguments of writers on the other side like Stephen Jay Gould, secking to

make them sound inconsistent. But after all this, D’Souza

insists that his
merelyillogical
view is that
or

cultural and behavioural traits,

own not genetic
ones, determine the myriad failures he discerns in Afro-America. Therefore
the whole genetic argument is an irrelevance to his case. Why, then, has he
presented it at such length and in such partisan fashion, unless on the old

proverbial basis that ‘if you throw cnough mud, some of it must stick"??
The longest and most detailed assault on Afrocentrism to appear thus far
has been Mary Lefkowitz’s book Not Out of Africa (1996a). This, however,
has a far narrower
compass than its ule would imply. Among the numerous

different claims made by Afrocentric writers, Lefkowitz considers only one:

Egyptian mfluence on ancient Greece, primarily in the sphere of philos-
ophy. Her main purpose is, quite simply, to defend the ‘integrity’ of ancient
Greece and of traditional classicalscholarship against what she regards as
10 AFROCENTRISM

Afrocentric calumnies. In this respect, she regularly slips into the kind of
ethnocentric arguments against which she protests elsewhere. Lefkowitz

complains that Afrocentrism ‘robs the ancient Greeks and their modern
descendants of heritage
a
rightly belongs that to them’ (ibid.: 126). Such
‘untruths do injustice, not only to the ancient Grecks who have been falsely
maligned, but to their descendants’ (168).
Lefkowitz offers an
extremely attenuated and in some
respects inaccurate
account of Afrocentrism’s intellectual
genealogy: for instance, she
regards
Marcus Garvey having originated views which, as we shall see, he had in
as

fact only popularized from varied older sources (130-34). Her explanation
of how Masonic ideas fed into Afrocentric writing is equally inadequate: I

attempt to provide a more satisfactory account of this odd byway in the

book, short it is, is ‘padded’ with
historyof ideas below. forLefkowitz’s
various instance,
as

irrelevant
digressions —
a
seemingly excursus on

Mozart’s Mage Flute (56, 118-20) and much repetition,

-

Some of her

arguments are extremely questionable: in her eagerness to disprove Afro-

centric claims that Cleopatra was black (on which she is no doubt correct)
she insists, far less plausibly, that Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra docs
not depict her as being dark-skinned: a view that involves her in quite
fanciful readings of passages in the play (38-9). She attacks Afrocentrists
for not being properly interested in relations between ancient Egypt and
Sub-Saharan Africa (a judgement which only ignorance about the range of
Afrocentric writing could sanction); but ironically, her own single, brief
reference to that issue is not only inaccurate about African kingship but
relies on the same out-of-date authority, Henri Frankfort, whose views

underpin some of the wilder claims made by Diop and other Afrocenitrists

(135).
Lefkowitz proclaims an interest in the sociology of knowledge, and
promises more than once to explain why Afrocentrism has had such appeal
to some students and intellectuals. This, however, she never does. Her
discussion of intellectual climates and traditions is brief and crude. She
to associate Afrocentrism with textualist relativist
appears
historical study, with the
postmodernist,
view of ‘history form
or

of fiction’
approaches to as a

(xiv) and confusingly describes by such stances as ‘cultural history’ (50) —

which is usually meant history the of culture, but which she uses to mean

history written from the viewpoint of cultural particularism and ‘new —

historicism’ (50) a term normally denoting the approach of such literary

—

scholars as
Stephen Greenblatt, but for Lefkowitz apparently meaning
‘mythicized history’.
Lefkowitz's Conclusion, moreover, docs not attempt to summarize the
intellectual balance sheet of Afrocentrism’s pseudo-historical claims, but
discusses how best to mount a
police action against them. It is hard not to

that the particular controversies in which Lefkowitz has been

suspect very
engaged at Wellesley College, around the activitics of her colleague Tony
Martin (see below, pp. 277-8), provided much of the stimulus for this. Her
final pages are, in effect, a call for university faculties and authorities to
 INTRODUCTION ll

censor Afrocentric courses, even if she believes that ‘the first line of defence
should be words and, when appropriate, even ridicule’ (171-2).
Perhaps the most serious flaw in Lefkowitz's book, however, is that its

analysis of Afrocentric writings is almost as

narrowly based as those of
the work of Yosef
Hughes or Schlesinger. She makes fairly brief reference to

Ben-Jochannen, Cheikh Anta Diop, and J.A. Rogers, and has elsewhere
(Lefkowitz 1992, 1996b) criticized Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, but her
main target of attack —

andonly the Afrocentric text she investigates in

detail —

is George G.M. James’s Stolen Legacy,James's little book has certainly

had an influence, but the metonymic approach of allowing it to stand in for
Afrocentrist history as a whole is clearly inadequate. Other writings in the

genre, many of them more substantial and coherently argued than James’s,
have very grave faults; but they are not necessarily the same faults as his.
Stolen. Legacy is a work of the utmost intellectual naivety, innocent of even

the outward appearances of academic procedure: to assail its inadequacies

as a
piece of scholarship in the way Lefkowitz does is to use a steamroller to

crack a nut. Lefkowitz does not appear to have uncovered any information
about James himself, or
sought to do so: his motivation (which he discusses
in some detail) is not considered. begin to fulfil Thus Lefkowitz does not

her promise to explain ‘how and why mythic or propagandistic “histories”

come to be written’ (134). An adequate and thorough investigation of
Afrocentric views of history would have to trace their genealogics through a
mass of nineteenth- and carly-twenticth-century black American writing
about Africa, to take detailed note of such major protagonists as Marimba
Ani, Molefi Asante, John G. Jackson, Ron Karenga, Ivan Van Sertima and
Chancellor Williams, and perhaps above all to look —

closely at the most —

influential and intellectually substantial of them all, Cheikh Anta Diop.

Lefkowitz does none of these things. I attempt them in the pages that follow.
A far more substantial voluine, co-edited by Lefkowitz and her Wellesley
colleague Guy Macl.ean Rogers, appeared almost snnultancously with Not
Out of Africa: Black Athena Revisited (Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996), a collection
of responses to Martin Bernal’s work, almost all of them highly critical, by
various classicists, Egyptologists and others. This too, therefore, has a

relatively restricted focus, but includes extremely important contributions

by such major scholars as
John Baines, Loring Brace, Robert Palter, Frank
Snowden and Frank Yurco. Their findings and arguments will be discussed
and drawn upon at various points below, especially in the chapter on Martin
Bernal (Chapter 15).
One fairly elementary widespread confusion but should be dealt with at
the outset. A rallying
common cry among many involved in African-
American education, writing and politics is the critique of ‘universalism’,
the same is true in what has become labelled postcolonial studies, and in
some branches of feminist thought. Very often, this critique seems to

confuse two or all of three rather different issues. First, there is opposition
to false or pseudo-universalism: criticism of a European particularism or,
indeed, chauvinism which poses as universal, as it has evidently done in a
 12 AFROCENTRISM

great deal of modern ‘Western’ thought. Such criticism of historic European

or Western pretensions, which were often closely linked with European
colonialism, has been a major and important part of the cultural politics of
recent decades.
though, is the critique of what
Second, one
might —

albeit guardedly -

call genuine universalism: attack on or dismissal of values, practices,

techniques which there are
good reasons —

to think —

transcend particular
cultures and traditions (or should do so). This second strand defends the
local, the particular, the culture-specific, or what it claims to be the
traditional. It very readily slides towards nationalist, xenophobic or racist
stances. Third and —

entirely different again —

is the critique of philosophical

universalism: the dental, often associated with postmodernist theories, that
notions of truth, logic, reason, and so on can be held independently of

particular cultures or
interpretive communities,
The antithesis or counter to the first ‘universalism’ is, quite simply,
awareness of and respect for cultural difference. The antithesis to the
second, however, is particularism, shading into what Edward Said (1993)
calls nativism and Samir Amin (1989) provincialism. The antithesis to the
third is an extreme relativism. For instance, a
person who points out that
the male-headed nuclear family is not a ‘universal’ form organiz- of social
ation but a culure-specific one (and one that is neither
ubiquitous nor in
any strong sense traditional within Western Europe itself) is engaged in the
first kind of critique. Someone who claims, as the Chinese and some Islamic
governments did at recent United Nations human rights summits, that a

universal code of human rights conduct is invalid because their countries’

cultural traditions dictate different —

and apparently much more restrictive

—

conceptions of such rights, is mounting the second and, in my view, far

less creditable sort of critique. And someone who says that the proposition
‘If A is greater than B, B cannot be greater than A’ is ruc only in certain
cultures, certain traditions of thought, and not in others (not a far-fetched
example, as we shall sce in relation to some Afrocentric thinkers) is involved
in the third line of critique.
In my view, the first kind of ‘anti-universalism’ is a valuable -
indeed,
essential —

corrective pretensions and distortions

to
European of cultural

history. The second, however, is at best a profoundly uninteresting kind of

cultural parochialism, and at worst (as with those repressive governments
which used it to defend human rights abuses, or with some Africans’ defence
of female genital mutilaiion on
grounds of ‘tradition’) an alibi for inhumane
and regressive practices. The third is simply absurd. We shall be seeing all
three, often muddled together, in operation in the theories discussed in
these pages."
My primary subject here, contemporary American Afrocentrism, ts only
one broad strand —

not the only one, arguably not the most important,

certainly not the most coherent or attractive —

in the long story of New

Work appropriations of the image of Africa. As Stuart Hall says, reflecting
on cultural identities in the Caribbean:
 INTRODUCTION 13

The political movements in the New World in the twentieth century have
had to
pass through the re-encounter with Africa, The African diasporas of
the New World have been in one way or another incapable of finding a place
in modern history without the symbolic return to Africa. It has taken many
forms, it has been embodied in many movements both intellectual and

popular. (S. Hall 1995: 9)

But further on, Hall issues a

warning which applics accurately to many of
the ideas discussed in these pages:

Africa is not waiting there in the fifteenth or seventeenth century, waiting for
you to roll back across the Atlantic and rediscover it in its tribal purity,
waiting there in its prelogical mentality, waiting to be woken from inside by
its returning sons and daughters. (ibid.: 11)

and stereotypes of Africa have been a

constantly recurring
theme
Images
in the histories of New World
may
but real
diasporic groups, practical
engagement with the troubles of contemporary Africa has been a much
more uneven story. As we shall sec, it was very much a minority phenomenon
among Afro-Americans, many of whom rejected the idea of having special
ties (o the African continent, at least until the 1950s—60s era of decoloniza-
tion in Africa and Civil Rights in the USA. We shall be
tracing aspects of
Afro-American responses to Africa and its history -
some of them surpris-
ingly perennial, constantly recurring themes of romantcization and ambiv-
alence. We shall not, however, be investigating important the but distinct
theme of direct political engagement by African-Americans seeking to aid
the continent’s liberation; a story which would run from Max Yergan’s
Council on African Affairs, founded in 1937, through the American Negro
Leadership Conference on Africa, the 1960s African Liberation Support
Commitice and its successors, culminating in the major African-American
mobilization against apartheid im the 1980s. Different aspects of this
constructive and often impassioned engagement have been analysed by
various scholars.”
Afrocentrists’ contributions to these campaigns, however, appear to have
been minimal. Few of the Afro-American cultural nationalists who loudly
proclaim their identification with Africa have seemed to evince a close or

informed interest in the continent itself, or have

played any major or

constructive role in the political campaigns against apartheid, let alone

against state repression in postcolonial Africa or on behalf of the victims of

genocide in Rwanda and famine elsewhere. Their Africa —

as Stuart Hall's
comment implies, and as complained is anmany imaginary critics have —

place, without real

history (as opposed
a to the
human mythographies of
conquering kings, superheroes, and bucolic bliss which they construct) as

well as without a
present: not only without hunger, military coups, gender
inequality and genocide, but equally without TV stations or traffic Jams,
human rights movements and contemporary artistic creativity. To my
14 AFROCENTRISM

knowledge, no self-proclaimed Afrocentrist in North America has ever

yet
published a detailed, substantial study of any particular African society, past
or
present, ancient or modern —

with the partial cxception, symptomiatically,

of works about ancient Egypt. The attitude is very well summed up in the
story a friend recently told me about a US academic conference a few years
back —

a story I have no reason to disbelieve. The friend had

presented a
analysing the sharply different stances on both and politics
aesthetics
paper
of two great current African writers, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka and the
Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. At the end, the most prominent of all the
academic Afrocentrists rose to denounce, in the most bitter terms, what had
been said. He had no
quarrel with any of the actual arguments put forward;
he seemed barely to have heard them. His objection was more findamental.
He thought itsimply wrong that a white person should dare to suggest that
two Africans disagreed with one another. As an African himself (albeit one

he knew could be: all Africans share the

born in Georgia} it just not same

values. End of argument, so far as he was concerned.

But if the Africa of the Afrocentrists is an
imaginary place, then so,

is their America. Their ideas, like cultural nationalism general, in

arguably,
quite simply have nothing at all to say about the most central problem
facing Afro-Americans; the conditions of economic marginality, insecurity
and underprivilege under which most of them exist. The cultural nationalist
siress on ethnicity to the virtual exclusion of all else may have done some

good addressing the handicap of low self-esteem

in which is a legacy of
Euro-racism and perhaps of slavery. Or rather, since the Afrocentrists and
cultural nationalists come overwhelmingly from the black middle class, or

aspire to it, it addresses problems of self-image and others’ negative -

perceptions which most affect

~
them.'® Economic analysis, and programmes
for economic reform, are simply absent, unaddressed. As Orlando Patterson
lamented over twenty years ago:

All this, of course, simply plays into the hands of the American establishment,
for there is no concerted attack on the economic root cause of the problem
—

an attack which involves real concessions if it is to be met by means other

than repression. Ironically, the cultural and symbolic demands emphasized
by most black leaders all
easily met.
are too It was ridiculously easy for the
establishment to respond by changing the color of a few faces in the ads ...

by publishing spate a of third-rate books on the greatness of the African

tradition, by the glorification of black roots. (Patterson 1977: 155)

Afrocentrism, today, responds to the ever

deepening crisis of the black
American poor by demanding more of the same."

Notes

1. The label itself 1s not universally accepted among those usually called Afrocentrists.
A few prefer “Africentrism’, which actually makes better sense etymologically. Molefi K.
 INTRODUCTION 15

Asante and his followers usually call their belief system “Afrocentnicity’ rather than
‘Afrocentrism’, and refer to their associated academic discipline as
‘Africology’. Erskine
Peters (1991) has suggested a distinction between ‘Afrocentric’ to denote study of African-
American life, and ‘Afrecentric’ for a focus on the continent itself and its historical
heritage, Some such disunction might indeed be analyucally useful, but Peters's terminol-
ogy qtute apart
—
from its pedantic air, and the value judgement he butids into it by
wewnyr ‘Africentrism’ as the more creatively valid of the two spheres ~
has not been taken
up by others.
2. Simon Jones's Black Culture, White Youth (1988) waces one strand of this ui the Briush
context,
$.One recent study, however (Merelman 1995), suggests that the teaching of black
history in high schools remains
primatily in the ‘contributionist’ mode stressing the
—

achievements of individual African Americans within US society

—
rather than being
mostly Afrocentric in the strong sense. What both approaches have in common ts a

tendency to talk about black history in an artifical isolation, rather than exploring the
complex interactions of different groups, whether m ancient Africa or in the modern
USA, The texts themselves often have a curiously hybrid air. Asante’s, as we shall sec,

eschews some of the wilder historical claims of hus other writing, but retams and adds
other very dubious arguments; while Grawlord’s mixes
thoughts on curriculum reform

drawing on
John Dewey and muluculturalist theory with comparatively sober overviews of
ancient Egyptian art and literature, but also with themes drawn uncritically from extremely
unreliable Afrocentric ‘authorities’ such as
George G.M, lames and Yosef Ben-Jochannen.
4, Judgement on this ‘scholasticismy’ also depends, of course, on
arguments
~
rather
complex ones about the status —

of historical ‘truth’. Edo nottry to make those arguments

here, but simply note a belief that while historical writmigs are
undoubtedly literary
artifacts, and are always shaped and evaluated by many considerations other than factual
or evidential accuracy, they can and must aso, vitally, be yudged according to their
accuracy. In the specific context of Afmcan-American historical writing, T would wish to

make a
sharp distinction between works which deliberately adopt an ‘epic’, heroic and
inspirational style of narration but none the less adhere to clear rules of evidence (good
examples would be Vincent Harding's There Is a River [1981], or Nathan Luggins’s Black
Odyssey (1990]), and those which engage m wild and apparently deliberate mythmaking,
whose statements bear no refation to the considered views of most specialists in their
fields. There may be good reasons to be critical of the former ~

such reasons are well

presented in Clarence Earl Walker's Deromantiezing Black
History (1991) —
but my target
here is the second, much more fantastic kind of writing about history: a
category into

which almost Afrocentricity falls. Nathan

all Huggins compares his and Harding's
approaches, and offers a
thoughtful defence of them, im his ‘Integrating Afro-Amercan

History into American History’ (1986: 163-5). Occasional attempts have been made ~

invariably by non-histornans —
to assert that ad/ historical writing is ‘inspirational’ m intent,
and that mternal distinctions are thus irrelevant (see, for mstance, Gilkes [ 1995: 30-32]).
Only historrographical ignorance or
philosophical naivety, | think, could sustain such a

view,

5. There ts a rather uncomfortable tony im

my quoting with approval, here and later,
the insistence of the young Pierre van den Berghe in 1970 on the irrelevance of race. The
older van den Berghe, m more recent years, has drawn ever closer to
somobtological
theories of history, with a concomitant belicf that race is extremely relevant to nearly
everything (1986, 1995), His later views, which I dislike, do not make his earlier ones any
less compelling.
6. For Britain, sec, amid a substanual literature, McDougall (1982); for Ireland the
unmatched researches of Joep Leerssen (1986, 1988, 1996). It may be added that histories
other than the European and the African are also repicte with such fantasy: see, for
instance, the racial theorics propounded at various umes by Arab (A-Azmech 1992),
Chinese (Dikotter 1992), and South Asian (Robb 1995) writers, or the ‘Aryamsm
developed by both British Ortentalists and Indian romantre culturalists (Trautmann 1997).
7 Other polemical assaults on US Afrocentesm include Lefkowrz (1992, 1996a), John
 16 AFROCENTRISM

Miller (1994), some contributions to Collier and Horowitz (eds 1997), and (perhaps the
most careful and measured brief criaque) Blakey (1995), On Afrocentrism in the sciences,

the critical literature is greater and probably better: see Gross and Levitt (1994); Kohn
(1995); Montellano (1993) and Palter (1996a). ‘The wider
phenomenon of conservative
counterattacks agamst the criuque of Euroceninc historiography what —

might be called
the ant-ant-Eurocentric backlash —

probably came earlier in France than im_ the

Anglophone world (see, for instance, Bruckner [1986]; Finkrelkraut [1988]}).

8. There is also a
quite distinct debate —
albert one which, in North America, has often
been confused with the debate over Afrocentrism —

around the politics of institutionalized

multiculturalism; notably, what kinds of respect, recognition or formal rights should be

granted to
culturally disunct groups withm: plural socieaes? | cannot pursue that debate
here -
for mayor recent statements of position mit, see Gutmann (1994); Kymlicka
(1995): Kymlicka (ed. 1995); Mendelsohn and Baxi (1904). Ecan only signal my scepucism
as to whether meaningfully be characterized
humans can as divided mto discrete cnttics
called ‘cultures’ sympathy for the ‘unnversalis’
and my and ‘cosmopolitan’ stances
represented, for mstance, by Jlirgen Habermas and Kwame Apprah in the Gutmann
collection, or Jeremy Waldron m the Kymlicka one.
9. See Duignan and Gann (1984); Isaacs (1963); Staniland (1991); Magubane (1987);
Lynch (1978); Anthony (1994); Nixon (1994). Fredrickson (1995) traces both parallels
and connections between black liberationist thought m the USA and that im South Airica;
while Zack-Williams (1995) calls for an overdue dialogue between the concerns of African-

diasponic cultural studies and those of development theory m Africa itself.

10. The generally middle-class character of Airocentrism is
emphasized by such Afro-
American critics as
Early (1995) and Marable (1995). No educational survey has yet
managed to show that there is any postave relauonship whatsoever between students’ sel
esteem and improving their academic, employment or economic performance. [tis not
even clear that African-American schoolchildren do overall express lower self-esteem than
whites (see Mecca et al. 1989, a reference for which | am indebted to Kwame Appiah).
The qumiessentially contemporary US emphasis on
positive sel-image has few, if any,
secure socioeconomic foundations. Molefi Asante, the most publicly promment Afrocen-
tric educator, denies in his reply to crite Diane Ravitch that enhancement of sclfestecm
is an
objective of Afrocentric schooling (Asante 1991b); but this appears meonsistent with
many of his other statements.

11. Analyses of that crisis are

ever-proliferating, One from which [ have learned
especially is Hacker (1992), This is not, of course, to suggest that there is no connection

between cultural transformations and cconomic

progress, but only that an exclusive

emphasis on the former is

unlikely to ard the latter. Condit and Lucartes (1993) argue
persuasively, as
agamst the elitism of much of the thought analysed here, how much the
discourse of equality in American history has owed to African-American mputs.
 Part One

Ancestors and Influences

 |-

Race: What’s in a Name?

The arguments over Afrocentrism, like the closely related ones which have
recurred under different names for decades, are about history and culture,
mentality and_ psychology, literature and linguistics, sex and economics;
about Africa, Europe, America, the Atlantic and the Mediterrancan. But
above all, they are about race, and are conducted in the language of race.

They invoke —

sometimes overtly, sometimes in a kind of code —

beliefs and
theories about racial or ethnic identities. Theories of race and ethnicity are,

of course, always claims about human group difference. The essential

distinction is between those which see the differences that matter as
being
physical ones, and those which conceive of them culturally. Nowadays we
the theories of the latter theories of
usually describe former as race,

ethnicity,
In the postwar world —

especially in the West, and especially among

liberals —
there has been a
powerful tendency towards the second language:
to talk of human difference in terms of ‘ethnic groups’ rather than ‘races’.
The shift had both a directly political motivation —

above all to refute the

‘race science’ of the Nazis —

asserting, in essence,
and a that
scientific one

race is not a
biologically, genetically, anthropologically or sociologically
meaningful concept. This latter proposition, denying that the language of
race has any scientific validity, was given the official imprimatur of the
United Nations in the postwar UNESCO Statement on Race. But the change
to the language of ethnicity has not necessarily wholly severed the link with

biology; for it is evident that lurking behind many usages scientific, —

of the discourse of ethnicity ideas about

popular and bureaucratic are
-

physical rather than well as cultural differences.

or as —

' —

Beliefs about physical differences have also, quite obviously, mvolved

ideas that they correlate to characteristics other than the purely physical. If
this were not the case, there would be little interest or controversy about
distinctions between humans which are mostly rather minor and ~

in the
case of the most observable ones —

literally superficial. Why would anyone

care that some of us are hairier, while some of them have shorter noses? In

fact, claims about physical variations have constantly been linked to claims
about differences in behaviour and capacities: above all, of course, In
20 AFROCENTRISM

intellectual capacity and/or psychological disposition, It is this association

which has made it difficult for many of us to believe that ideas about

physical variations among human groups could even in principle be neutral,

objective, value-free. It is still less casy to

accept that claims about psycho-
logical difference could be value-free: recent controversy over Charles

Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve (1994) has provided a

striking new instance of how any such claims scem inevitably to carry strong
and disturbing moral-political overtones.?
Statements such as ‘science does not recognize the existence of race’,
however, induce their own kinds of scepticism, and these may be increasing
in the 1990s." The ‘sciences’ most directly concerned with these issues are

generally thought clustermg towards

of as the ‘sof? end of the intellectual

spectrum; those least able to produce clear-cut and definitive results, with
least. consensus about methodology and the conditions of proof, most

susceptible to subjective, emotive or

ideological colouring psychology, —

palacoanthropology, archacology, let alone history, cultural anthropology

and sociology. And there has been a widespread, increasing recognition
that science in general can never be simply and wholly valuc-frec knowledge.
A wide range of studies in the history and sociology of science, together
with relativist theorics such as those of Thomas Kuhn or the more extreme

scepticism of Paul Feyerabend, have accustomed most observers to sce how

‘external’ considerations -—

from the ambitions and emotions of individual

researchers, through the protocols of professional institutions, to political
ideologies —
condition what scholars believe.
Three further kinds of influence have advanced the climate of scepticism.
One is the crilique mounted by social theorists, especially feminists, postco-
lonial polemicists and to some extent Marxists (a lesser extent, because
classical Marxism both inherited the Enlightenment belief in scientific pro-
gress and rationality, and sometimes proclaimed scientific status for itself)
directed at the gender, racial or ‘Eurocentric’, class and other biases fre-

quently inscribed into what has counted as scientific procedure and proof,
Second is an cnvironmentalist critique, urging the
negativeconsequences
increasingly altendant on
‘progress’, This is some-
scientific and technical
times linked to what are often called New Age philosophies, which advocate
the replacement of scientific thought by more spiritual, more humanistic
(or, conversely, less ‘speciesist’), more holistic world-views.* Third, a cluster
of postmodernist, poststructuralist and textualist approaches, taking their
methods and assumptions above all from literary theory and from particular
currents of (mostly Franco-German) philosophy, subject all claims about
‘scientific truth’ to radical doubt. In their more fundamentalist forms, they
assert instead that any such claims are
merely rival narratives or discourses,
none of which has any greater truth-value than any other, and none of which
can be founded on
anything outside itself.
All these controversies have had especially resonance in the
United States with for
powerful
our main themes here. The
strong consequences
—

USAis, it has often been said, not only an

exceptionally ‘multiracial’ but an
 RACE: WHAT'S IN A NAME? 21

intensely race-conscious society. The categorization of and terminology for

different racial groups have constantly been altered, as a moment’s thought
about the histories of people at different times labelled ‘Indians’, whether

they are of Pueblo, Pawnee or

Punjabi ancestry, will suggest. But the central

object of the obsession has always been distinctions between black and
white.® ‘This has apparently distant
heavily but
influenced the way issues as

emotionally charged as the racial make-up of ancient Egypt’s population

have been discussed.® Chicago University Egyptologist Frank Yurco rather
plaintively moaned:

When you talk about Egypt, just not right to talk about black or white.
it’s
That's all just American terminoijogy and it serves American purposes, I can
understand and sympathize with the desires of Afro-Americans to affiliate
themselves with Egypt. But to take the terminology here in the United States
and graft it onto Africa is anthropologically inaccurate. (quoted in D'Souza
1991: 119)

An generation of Afro-American
earlier scholars tended to share the
same
scepticism. Veteran popular historian and Ebony editor Lerone Ben-
nett’s view of ancient Egypt is typically guarded:

If black people were a

major clement among the peoples who fathered

fgyptian civilization, who were the Egyptians? The question bristles with
thorns. The only thing that can be said with assurance is that they probably
were not Caucasians. The evidence (which Bennett then goes on to summar-

ize in an even-handed way) suggests that they were a black-, brown- and

yellow-skinned people who sprang from a mixture of Negro, Semitic and

Caucasian stocks. (Bennett 1984: 7)

Such presentation,
a with all its admitted uncertainties, probably repre-
sented scholarly a consensus, at the time, among those who had given the
issue thought and Bennett noted
—

the variety of physical types and skin

hues in which the Egyptians depicted themselves, while quite reasonably also
pointing out that all of them ‘would have been forced in the forties to sit on
the back seats of the buses in Mississippi’ (ibid: 7). But in its mild caution,
a view like Bennett’s or Yurco’s seems
increasingly irrelevant to the present-
day US storms over racial identity and African legacies: storms in which
ancient Egypt and its peoples’ possible skin colours have a
surprisingly
important role. To understand why, we need to go, if not quite so far as the
Egypt of the Pharaohs, then certainly far back and far away from the
modern United States.

Notes

L. For overviews, see Gould (1981); Stepan (1982); Barkan (1992); Kohn (1995),
2. See Jacoby and Glauberman (1995) for an extensive sample of responses the great —
22 AFROCENTRISM

majority of them hostile to this book. It is a striking indication

—
of the centrality of race
to the American imagination, as against the lack of public debate about soctal class, that
whereas the bulk of The Bell Curve actually deals with alleged differences of intelligence
between classes rather than between races, the controversy focused almost entirely
racial This included the
ensuing Charles media
on
questions. surviving author, Murray's, own

puffing for his work.

3. Kohn is a
thoughuul overview of
(1995) current disputes.
the

4, For
scathing a and, i my view, overstated
~—
assault on the ‘myths —
of primitive
harmony’ often underlying such views, see Edgerton (1992). Keeley (1996), more tightly
focused
warfare and
and better
homicide
documented, offers
compellingevidence for the pervasivencss of
‘primitive’ peoples.
among most
5, Or even and perhaps increasingly
—

between African-Americans and ‘everyone

—

else’, in so far as Afro-Americans remain sharply, perhaps uniquely, differenuiated from

the remainder of the population by almost every indicator from residential segregation to
rates of intergroup marriage: see on this, amid a
large and depressing literature, Massey
and Denton (1993). For a
strong argument that mstitationalized educational multicultar-
alism is a necessary response to such circumstances —

from a writer previously identified

as rather unsympathetic to such stances —
see Glazer (1997).
6. Many aspects of these American controversies could be captured only through a

close attention to the sociology of knowledge and media studies: how clarms about race,

including the racial identities of ancient Egypt, have been played out in the US and other
mass media. The present exercise in the history of ideas docs not attempt to tackle that
task except in passing. McAlister (1996) essays a small segment of it, in relation to the
1977-78 US museum ‘tour’ of exhibits from the Tutankhamun tomb.
 2

Pan-Africanism and Négritude

The pioneering black political thinker Edward Wilmot

Blyden, writing well
over a century ago, neatly encapsulated the why a language of
reasons

Otherness, of absoluic difference, has seemed powerfully attractive to those

who felt themselves to be victims of racial vilification:

It is a
question of difference of endowment and difference of destiny. No
amount of training or culture will make the Negro a European; on the other
hand, no lack of training or deficiency of culture will make the European a

Negro. The two races are not moving in the same

groove with an immeasur-
able distance between them, but on parallel lines. They will never mect in
the plane of their activities so as to coincide in capacity or performance.

They are not zdentical, as some think, but unequal they are distinct but equal.

(quoted in Mudimbe [1988: 118]; original emphases.)

This polarization of alternatives resonates through more than a hundred

years of argument over race, culture and human capacity in colonial and
racially oppressive situations. It stated the crucl dilemma for victims of racist
stereotyping: either ‘European’ conception of human
accept a worth and
achievement, and be judged inferior
by it; or proclaim Otherness, a radically

incommensurable ethos and destiny. Even if in practice individuals have

mixed the approaches, and if increasingly self-conscious and sophisticated
syncretic models have emerged, much intellectual as well as political debate
still operates with these sharp polarities. Arguably, indeed, their antagonisms
have become more extreme in recent decades, They are related to
though
—-

in principle distinct from the more directly political clash of integrationist

—

and separatist programmes, which inevitably had and has its most powerful
relevance for culturally distinct groups within plural societies.
For sheer weight, intensity, persistence of negative prejudice, maybe no
major human group has been so burdened by others’ attitudes as have
Africans invidious
-—

though such comparisons always are. A mass of

European literature over an extended historical period quite seriously posed

the question whether Africans were human at all, and sometimes answered
it negatively. Thus it was probably that some inevitable
of the most dramatic

23
2d AFROCENTRISM

affirmations of Otherness, as declarations of cultural Independence, should

come from intellectuals of African descent -

and that they should come in

the diaspora more on the continent itself. In the Americas, both access to

education and publishing, experience and insecurity of cultural born from

the destruction of or displacement from ‘traditional’ African modes of life
and from long exposure to racist calumny, were greater than they were on

the African continent.

One can trace
diasporic responses asserting a
specific African cultural
ethos and destiny, a form of cultural nationalism, at least as far back as

Blyden or, before him, Martin Delany and David Walker: Afro-American
mtcHectuals of the pre-Civil War years. The most striking and influential
cultural expressions of this stance came, however, from the Francophone
Caribbean (and to a lesser extent the ‘évolués’ of French West Africa: the
educated minority whom the colonial rulers judged to have attained to full-

fledged Frenchness) with

négritude literary movement the of the 1930s and
after. The pronouncements of its leading figures -
Aime Césaire, Léon
Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor set the tone for —

much of the “Third

World’ and ethnic mmority cultural nationalism that has followed (see
especially, from amid a vast literature, Mudimbe [1992]). Négritude has,
moreover, become one of the main influences on
contemporary Afrocentric
and similar theories: in part directly, in part through elective affinity, and
even more
through the mediation of what became labelled ‘cthnophiloso-
phy’ and of the most ubiquitous presence in Third-Worldist cultural theory,
Frantz Fanon. In subsequent commentary it has often also been linked —

and sometimes misleadingly limped together with the political separatism —

of which Marcus Garvey’s movement was the most famous expression;

though intellectually one of the least coherent and, in terms of direct

political impact, among the least successful. In fact, though, the founding

figures of néerdude emphasized African cultural and psychological distinc-

tiveness but did not, on the whole, have a separatist political progranime or

even, necessarily, any political programme at all.

One must thus beware of thinking of the négritude movement and its
descendants as only and always figures of nationalist, anticolonialist or even

antiracist reaction, For a start, it is highly questionable how much of it can

accurately be described as anticolonial. Its main precursor, Haitian ‘noir-

isme’, was directed at least as much against an
indigenous ‘mulatto’ elite as

it was against neocolonial French or US influences in independent Haiti

(see Dash [1981]; Nicholls [1979 chs 5-7]). Senghor and, even more,

Césaire coupled their culturalist: reyection of European hegemony with

strong political loyaltics to the French connection. Négritude was, as Afro-
American critic Charles Johnson rightly suggests, ‘not philosophy. We have
a doctrine, not analysis’ (1988: 19). Indeed it may well be, as Valentin
Mudimbe persuasively argues, that it was
Jean-Paul Sartre, not the wégritude
poets themselves, who turned a literary movement into a political philos-
ophy, thus ‘stultifying’ tin the rhetoric of absolute Otherness: ‘Senghor . ..

had asked Sartre for a cloak to celebrate négritude, he was given a shroud’
 PAN-AFRICANISM AND NEGRITUDE 25

(Mudimbe 1988: of course

85). And
many other crucial oppositional
thinkers of thediaspora, like W.E.B.
African Du Bois, C.L.R. James and
George Padmore, explicitly rejected cultural nationalism and adhered (most
of the time) to more universalist and rationalist philosophies, derived in

large part from Marxism.

The notion of Pan-Africanism, meanwhile, not only straddicd these
divisions but came over time to bear at least four fairly distinguishable
meanings:

L. The aspiration for political co-operation, and awareness of a common

experience of discrimination, among peoples of African descent wher-

ever they may live (this was the carliest usage of the term).
2. The claim that people of African descent, wherever they live, have and
should rediscover common sociocultural traditions derived from their
shared origins. Some versions of this belief speak in terms of a distinctive
‘African personality’ involving shared philosophies, attitudes to life, or
modes of expression and behaviour. In the Francophone world this latter
variant came to be known as
négritude or (in Haiti) nomisme. More

recently in the Anglophone world, and especially the USA, similar beliefs
have adopted the title Afrocentrism.
3. Belief in the need for the political unity, or at least much closer political,
economic and cultural co-operation, between the states of the African
continent (or, in some variants, its Sub-Saharan sector). This essentially
political and geographical conception of the term is the most widespread
within Africa, whereas outside it definitions (1) and (2) are perhaps
more often meant: this has often caused misunderstanding.
4, In some situations, especially in South Africa, Pan-Africanism has become
ithe political label of those who tend to stress the racial clement in group
conflict and identity as against emphasis on social class, political ideology,
or universalist principles.

There is no one ‘founder’ of Pan-Africanism. W.E.B. Du Bois may be seen,

perhaps, as the effective initiator of a

political movement in the first sense

above. The most important carly exponent of the «dea was

probably Edward
Wilmot Blyden, born in St Thomas in the West Indies in 1832. Blyden was
one of emphasize past African
the first to cultural achievements and the
need for and
racial
solidarity pride. He also, however, adopted a somewhat
mystical conception of African character, which he saw as essentially spiritual
and ill-fitted for technical or scientific achievement. He was extremely
hostile towards
people ancestry, of and in later
mixed life he became an

apologist for European colonialism in Africa (Lynch 1967). Other important

progenitors included Martin R, Delany (1812-85), a freeborn Afro-American
from Virginia who asserted the cultural distinctiveness and African heritage
of black Americans as well as campaigning for their political rights. He
became an
carly advocate of ‘back to Africa’ ideas. Equally important,
though this time more beyond the USA, was James Africanus Horton
26 AFROGENTRISM

(1835-1883), a London-trained Sierra Leonese surgeon who, for his cri-

of racist theories and advocacy of West African
independence, has
tiques
been called the ‘father of modern African political thought’ (Fryer 1984:
277, quoting George Shepperson).
For the négritude concept itself, the most influential figure was
Léopold
Sédar Senghor, the poet and cultural theorist who later became President
of Senegal. His beliefs and those of his circle were
forged in France in the
1930s, under prejudice
pressure of the which African and Caribbean
students, visitorsémugrés encountered
and there. Senghor recalled in a —

fairly typical experience, if a less bitter one than, say, that famously recalled
by Frantz Fanon that it was only on going to Paris that ‘I became
—
conscious
of belonging to the basic category of Negro’ (quoted in Vaillant 1990: 97).
The idea that migrants, visitors or students from the different far-flung
colonies of the French Empire had a shared identity was, then, in the
beginning imposed mainly by the prejudices of others. Yet such categoriz-
ations did not overcome the divisions and mutual suspicions between
Africans and West Indians in the Paris of the 1930s (ibid.: 99-102; see also
Arnold 1981).
Nor did they by any means necessarily lead to a total rejection of “Western
civilization’ and of universalist ideas; though this has often, in our own time,
come to be seen as the most natural response. Senghor's pronouncements
that African mentalities and approaches to knowledge were entirely distinct
from those of Europeans gained a wide audience, and have had many
followers —

including, as we shall see, numerous contemporary American

Afrocentric thinkers. He asserted:
‘European reasoning analytical, discur-
is
sive by utilization; Negro-African reasoning is intuitive by participation’
1964: 74). But this not absolute division: in his theory
(Senghor was an

these were
psychological tendencies, no more. They were complementary
rather than antagonistic, and they were
outweighed in significance by
shared human traits. In Senghor’s early writings the universalist category of
humanism is persistently central, and it is invariably used as a
positive term.
Even subsequently, when he came to stress more and more insistently the
basic contrast between European and African personalities, he continued to

issue: ‘Disclaimers and occasional reminders that all human qualities might
be found, albeit in different mixes, among all peoples’ (Vaillant 1990: 251).
It was, again, left to Jean-Paul Sartre to
provide the sweeping, essentialist
claims which on the whole Senghor avoided.
Senghor’s attitude was very far from the later ‘Afrocentric’ practice of
ostentatiously and fraudulently
—

disavowing any European —

intellectual
influence: his debts to Marx, Durkheim and Weber, as well as to French

literary models, were openly proclaimed, and there remained a kind of

universalism in his ambitions: ‘to make
Négnfude a concept that might
of
take its place among the great principles of his day, grand principles such
as humanism and socialism’ (Vaillant 1990: 251-2). He also remained
selective in what he attacked about European legacies: he never, for
instance, criticized Christianity as such. And he insisted that far from being
 PAN-AFRICANISM AND NEGRITUDE 27

intrinsically ‘Négrtude is Africa's

separatist, contribution to the coming
universal (Senghor, quoted in Vaillant
civilization’ 1990: 266), The aspect
of négriude which became most famous, Senghor’s and Césaire’s claim that
African peoples had special qualities of intuition, creativity and
spontaneity,
spirituality as against the European strengths in logical and_ scientific
thought, must be read in that context. Later uses and abuses of négritude,
however, tended to retain the essentialist claim about specific racial mental-
ities while abandoning the universalist humanism in which Senghor embed-
ded it.
Nor did the shocking experience of white hostility and cultural disdain by
any means necessarily produce the populist response, secking refuge in
ideas of tradition and folk culture, which later appeared mandatory in some
circles. Senghor and his colleagues in the movement formed around the
Paris-based magazine Présence Africare were artistic experimentalists, clearly
parts of the cultural avant-garde of their day in France. That particular
association has since appeared much weakened, even
angrily repudiated, by
many. Instead, the essentially negative reaction against alien domination
has tended to become closely allied with populism, anti-intellectualism, and
a
rigidly functionalist notion of the ‘committed’ role of artistic, cultural and
intellectual creation. These, of course, are familiar themes in the history of

left-wing cultural
theory; years they in recent have been turned ever more

insistently to the service of Third-Worldist nationalism. Sometimes this takes

ventriloquist forms, with theorists in advanced capitalist countries perceiving

~

and, indeed, prescribing narrowly agitational roles for “Third World’

-

thinkers, writers and artists: roles which they apparently do not think it
appropriate to demand of metropolitan intellectuals.' It also finds passion-
ate in some ‘minority’ discourse and those sceking to legislate
for
expression
it, in the US
as
Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s. At their most

extreme the demands echoed, consciouslyor otherwise, a Maoist kind of

instrumentalism, as with black cultural nationalist Karenga’s 1968
Ron call
for black art to ‘expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the
revolution’ (‘Black Art, in Gates and McKay 1997: 1974). Karenga thus
insisted, crudely, that ‘any art that does not discuss and contribute to the
revolution is invalid’ (ibid.: 1973). As we shall discover, such anti-intellectual
and culturally conservative notions have not only been a
recurring presence
in Afro-American life, but have gained a new lease of strength in our own

times.

Note

l.An mstance of a crude version of this stance is Gugelberger (1991); a more

sophisticated variant is Jameson (1986).

 3

African Origins and the Claim of Primacy

The study of human origins is inherently laden with ideology and emotion
more so than almost any other kind of intellectual inquiry. Certainly
-

palacoanthropology, the science of humanity's biological emergence and

development, has been marked by a history of bitter and often highly

personalized confrontations, as
Roger Lewin’s, or Erik Trinkaus and Pat

Shipman’s, fine popular histories of the subject show (Lewin 1987; Trinkaus
and Shipman 1993). Most recently, the fierce antagonisms between Donald

Johansen and Timothy White, leading rival research teams in Ethiopia, or

between Milford Wolpolf and Chris Singer, have hit the world’s media
headlines (e.g. Fitzgerald 1995). Indeed, a
degree of emotional intensity
unmatched in any other ‘exact’ science is imparted to the discipline by the

very questions it asks. Where did we come from? How, and why, did our
species turn into what it is?
That emotional resonance around the history of human physical emerg-
ence is equalled or exceeded in the case of the origins of civilization or -

rather, of the bundle of attributes to some or all of which the title civilization

conventionally given: the births

is of agriculture, urbanization, literacy,
large-scale political forms, ethical and religious beliefs, technologies, systems
of abstract or
speculative thought, and so on, In fact the emotional stakes
are, if anything, higher for this latter question, because it interrelates more

closely and evidently with contemporary political concerns. These include

issues of race, nationalism and political geography relating above all to —

the places of Europe on the one hand, Africa on the other, in the story.
Archaeology has thus become even more intensely politicized than
palacoanthropology, on issues ranging from the relevance to the ancient

past of modern theories of unperialism (Champion 1989), through the

agonizings of South African archacologists about their work's political
unplications (Martin Hall 1990), to the demands of Native American and
other indigenous peoples for control over and reburial of their ancestors’
skeletal remains (Layton 1994). Most generally of all, there is
unending
dispute in many different contexts between ‘diffusionists’ and ‘isolationists’:
those who are keen to identify the patterns by which ideas, cultures or

technologies spread from some places to others, and those who want to find

28
 AFRICAN ORIGINS AND THE CLAIM OF PRIMACY 29

independent —

sometimes multiple —
local roots for them. As we shall sec,

some
proponents of cach approach accuse the champions of the other of
racism; and, perplexingly, both are sometimes right.
So far as human physical origins are concerned, it has long been widely
accepted that the earliest directly traceable ancestors of Homo sapiens
appeared in eastern Africa. The major controversies of recent years have
been over where in East Africa the first identifiably direct. proto-human was
witnessed; such as those between Richard Leakey, whose discoveries were in
Tanzania and Kenya, and Donald Johansen, who worked in Ethiopia.’ The
honour of being the cradle of humanity was, almost without doubt, Africa's.
Many Africans, and writers and publicists elsewhere of African descent, have
taken great pride in this. Some have erected substantial rhetorical structures

on that basis, a recent feminist subtheme claiming great signifi-

cance for the includingmajor
fact that one candidate for the title of earliest known
human remains, Johansen’s famous discovery ‘Lucy’, was female as well as

African.
On the issue of the birthplace of the carliest hominids, then, first

Johansen’s ‘Lucy’, then Timothy White’s 1994 discovery of considerably

older hominid remains, also in seemed to give the Africanists a

decisive hand.
Ethiopia,
there is still between those who
upper However, argument
think that modern humanity developed from several distinct: hominid

population groups, in several different regions, around the same time (e.g.
Wolpoff 1989a, b; Wolpoff and Caspari 1997), and those who propose that
not only did carly hominids emerge in Africa, but modern humans also all
share a much more recent common African ancestor.

Ideas deeply involved

about in the background
race are of this contro-

versy, and especially in the bitter exchanges over

became overt Carleton
Coon’s championing of the ‘multiple or igins’ which he linked to

claims that many racist.” Both

viewpoint,
sides in the call
thought overtly dispute on

genctic as well as fossil evidence. This has been most dramatically deployed
on the Africanisis’ side, with the 1987 claim by Rebecca Cann, Mark

Stoneking and Allan Wilson that all modern humans could be traced, on

the basis of a worldwide DNA survey,single African woman to who lived

a

about 200,000 years ago (Cann et al.

1987). Inevitably, popular coverage of
the scientific claim dubbed this putative universal ancestress ‘Eve’. (It should
be noted that ‘Eve’ is not the same lady as ‘Lucy’, who is roughly ten times
as old.)
Eve, even more than Lucy, has evident utility for antiracists and universal-
ists, as well as for those predisposed to claims of priority. She is
African

apparently powerful evidence for close human familyhood: we all have a

relatively recent common ancestor. And she was African though the fact
—

that she was female reflects only the fact that mitochondrial DNA tests allow
scientists to trace maternal, but not paternal, lincages far back in time; and
of course they do not tell us her skin colour. There are strong arguments
from fossil and other evidence, as well as
genetic research, for believing that
well after the first diffusion of hominids from Africa, a second dispersal of
30 AFROCENTRISM

clearly modern human beings —

our more immediate and direct ancestors —

sallied forth out of Africa to

populate the globe, replacing prior Neander-
thal and other populations in Eurasia? It is argued that this second group
were the descendants of ‘Eve’. But the case was still not proven: critics have
claimed to methodological flaws in Cann
find serious et @l.’s work.’ Alterna-
tive readings of the evidence might, it was suggested, propose non-African
or, indeed, multiple sites of origin. In 1997, however, dramatic and in many

eyes decisive new evidence appeared to support the Africanists’ case.

Scientists at Munich University succeeded in

extracting and analysing DNA
from Neanderthal bones, and found genctic variation so
great that it

appeared impossible for Neanderthals and modern humans to have shared

a common ancestry. (See, amid the mass of global media coverage for these

findings, Mihill 1997.)

The ideas multiple origins for modern
of humanity proposed first by
Franz Weidenrcich and then updated by Carleton Goon they even have —

some echoes of pre-Darwinian ‘polygenist’ theories of human origins, which

said that different races were separate species are
given far greater —

scientific rigour in Milford Wolpoff’s work. Wolpoff and his co-thinkers, it

must be emphasized, do not attempt and would not desire to link arguments
about early human origins to contemporary racialized thought in the ways
Weidenreich and Coon did (though some other contemporary theorists,
like Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, certainly do proclaim such links).°
Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman suggest that the carlier storms had scared
scholars addressing these issues. Carleton
away from Coon’s critics had
exhibited ‘outspoken moralizing and merciless judgemental quality
stony undertones of political correctness’ (1993: 322) in attacking his

alleged racism. They go on:

The public attacks on Coon impressed an entire generation of anthropolo-

gists with the notion that any discussion or even acknowledgement of racial
differences would call similar censure down on their heads. ... Race was not

only subject
not a fit to
study: 2 didn’t even exist... race went underground.
By becoming unseeable, unknowable, and intangible, race became a threat-

ening and all-powerful issue. (ibid.: 324)

There are, I think, better reasons than Trinkaus and Shipman suggest for
extreme scepticism using the language
about of race. Their implication that
race was not a
‘threatening and all-powerful issue’ when its presence was

extremely overt, and that it became so

only when it ‘went underground’, is

quite evidently false. But they are certainly right to suggest that its
banishment from the surface of scientific discourse has not necessarily
weakened its power. As we shall discover, it continues to raise its head in
almost every imaginable context: often with the ironic or
tragic twist that it
is African and Afro-American intellectuals who have most vehemently
insisted on the reality and centrality of race to human history.
Moreover, hypotheses of a recent, common ancestor for all human
 AFRICAN ORIGINS AND THE CLAIM OF PRIMACY 31

groups do not necessarily buttress antiracist belicfs. Palacoanthropologist

William Howells and biochemist Vincent Sarich suggest that differentiation
into the races identified today began only well after Eve, let alone Lucy. It
came about 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. This is a claim
that can be used —
as it is, in highly polemical and controversial form, by
Sarich —

to argue that racial distinctions are extremely important. For such

allegedly very large differences, both physical and cultural, among human

groups as are shown throughout recorded history to have emerged so very

quickly indicates that they resulted from intense pressures of natural

selection. It is quite reasonable, then, to think that these also produced
dramatic differences in the psychological nature of races: for instance, in

intelligence or emotional make-up (Kohn 1995: 172-7).

The
serviceability of such ideas, even if they are truc, to racial theory, and

especially claims of African inferiority, may, however, be doubtful. One

reason for doubt is that it radically false
can be argued that Sarich makes a

inference: it is more plausible of diversity

to think that rapid emergence
reflects not just environmental selective pressures but intelligent adaptation
to those pressures, indicating the shared high intelligence of al human
groups. As we shall see later in relation to
arguments over civilizational

origins, both environmental determinism, and diffusionism as

opposed to

theories multiple origins, of deployed by can be all sides of modern

historico-political debates.
Certainly it is hard to mount arguments based on human physzcaldiversity
which would mark off Africans from ‘the rest’ as a preliminary to asserting
mental or behavioural differences. Africa is the most diverse of the conti-
nents in physical types with, for instance, both the tallest and the shortest

people.® Nor is it easy to use environmental determinism to such ends,

unless the simple fact of warm
temperatures is to be the yardstick —

which,
as we shall see, it has often and crudely been, as for instance in some

Afrocentrists' ‘Sun Pcople-Ice Peopie’ dichotomy or, in more rational

fashion, by Cheikh Anta Diop and his followers. Beyond the basic fact that
most of Africa is warmer, most of the time, than most of Eurasia, there are

few environmental factors common to the whole continent —

common to

rainforest and desert, swamp and savannah, ecosystems rich in edible plants
and animals and those extremely poor in them.
In any case, noting Africa’s probable primacy in humanity's biological
emergence provides no answer to the characteristic European sneers that

‘humanity may have first developed in Africa, but has long ceased to

continue developing there’. The struggle for the claim to have originated
‘civilization’ is even more important to
present-day racial and other

ideologies.
On one level, it might be said that there is no
great argument here,
certainly less than there is over the physical location of the earliest hominids
~
few scholars doubt that most, at least, of the major components of
‘civilization’ together first in Mesopotamia,
came in the region of what is
now Iraq. Any dispute on the lines of ‘Which came first, Africa or
Europe?’
32 AFROGENTRISM

might appear a red herring, for the evident

to be answer is: neither, But

things are
straightforward as that. Certainly such major features
not so of
‘civilization’ as literacy and urbanization appeared in Egypt very soon after

they did in southwest Asia and it remains possible that some

—

did so a touch
earlier.” It is also by no means sure that if such features did first occur in

Mesopotamia, they necessarily spread from there to Egypt. The develop-

ments may well have been parallel and independent of one another; just as
some archacologists believe that the crystallization of urban, literate cultures
gusta liule later still in the Indus valley, and then in China, were autonomous
rather than being products of diffusion. In other words, even if Egypt was

first, its culture have been substantially original and indige-

not
quite may
nous —
or as much so as any culture ever is.
For though, an argument
some, Egypt was first has a huge and
that

specific emotional weight. This has becn

so
especially for an old, albeit
narrow, tradition of Afro-American thought. For more than two centuries,
black scholars and publicists made the claim that civilization was African in

origin a
centrepiece of their efforts to vindicate the reputation and enhance
the sel-esteem of African-cescended peoples. Identification of Pharaonic

Egypt, or of regions further south like the ‘Cushite’ states of the upper Nile,
or of ‘Ethiopians’ (a term often used, especially in’ nineteenth-century
writings, as
synonymous with ‘Negro’ or black African) as the originators of
arts, sciences, technologies and political organization became a
centrepiece
of the fight back against white aspersion.
Denial that Egyptian civilization preceded that of Mesopotamia, it there-
fore came to be felt, must be the product of antiAfrican racism, Veteran
Afrocentrist John Henrik Clarke alleges, for instance, that European schol-
ars began to assert the priority of Western Asia, in an evidently dishonest
and racist move, only after their claims about the ‘whiteness’ of the ancient
had been discredited (Clarke 1992: 9), The for the
Egyptians reasons

well summarized in Ivan

centrality accorded to
Egypt in that tradition are

Van Sertima’s encapsulation of the Afrocentric view of ancient history.

Egypt preceded everyone else, and Egyptian civilization in its turn derived
in all essentials from further south, from the ‘heartland’ of the Upper Nile

Valley and/or Ethiopia. Not only the historical claims, but the insistent,
emotive language and the equally insistent racial categorizations are typical
of the entire genre:

Egypt was the node and center linking the strands

of a vast of Africa's
web
main cultures languages; and light the
crystallized at the that
center of this

early world had been energized by the cultural electricity streaming from the
heartland of Africa; the creators of classical Egyptian civilization, therefore,
were not the brown Mediterranean Caucasoids invented by Sergi,” nor the
equally mythical Hamites, nor Asiatic nomads and invaders, but indigenous,
black-skinned, woolly-haired Africans; Greece, mother of the best in Euro-

pean civilizaiion, was once a child suckled at the breast of Egypt even as

had been suckled at the breast of Ethtopia which itself evolved from
Egypt
 AFRICAN ORIGINS AND THE CLAIM OF PRIMACY 33

the complex interior womb of the African motherland. (Van Sertima 1989:
322)

None of these ideas

original to current American
is Afrocentrism, and few
of them were
originated by Cheikh
even Anta Diop, the Senegalese historian
often seen as the father figure of the movement. Afrocentric writer Tony
Martin, unlike many of his colleagues, recognizes this in saying that
‘Afrocentrism is a currently popular term for an idea that is as old as African
American scholarly writing’ (Martin 1993: 51). He could have said: consider-
ably older. The next chapter surveys some of the ways in which black
American authors from the middle years of the nineteenth century to the
middle years of the twenticth used —

and abused —

ideas about the African

past for a wide range of contemporary purposes, but above all to assert

racial self-respect.

Notes

1. These disputes, marked as much by powerful clashing personalities as by scientific

divergence, are discussed m
Virginia Morell’s vivid 1995 study of the Leakey family.
2. Trinkaus and Shipman (1993: 278-81, 312-24) surveys these battles, with more

sympathy for Coon than I myself can muster,

3. Stringer and Gamble (1993); Lahr and Foley (1994); Stringer and McKie (1996);
Nitecki and Nitecki (1994); Jones, Martin and Pilbeam (1992); Shreeve (1995).
4, See, for instance, Wolpoff (1989a, b), Trinkaus and Shipman (1993: 342-97),
Shreeve (1995) and Kingdon (1993: 255-93) summanze the
disputes. To this non-
specialist, the arguments on the Africanist side of the debate presented in studies such
as

Stringer and MeKie (1996) seem, for the moment, decisively convincing, and are further
remforced by the 1997 Munich findings.
5. Wolpoff and Caspar: (1997) presents the muluregionalist theory at greatest length
and in greatest detail, places it m the context of carlier debates on human evolution and
race, and argues forcefully that neuher Wolpoff’s own version of 1 nor Werdenreich's
carlier one offers any comfort to or holds any affinity with racist theories.
6. This diversity 1s, meidentally, a powerful piece of indirect evidence for the suppost-
dion that human evolution has been taking place for longer m Africa than anywhere clsc.
Africa also appears to contain more
genetic diversity than any other continent.
7. There is also an
intriguing possibility it can at present be put no higher than that
— —

that sophisticated toolmaking, and a recorded number system, emerged in tropical Africa
much earlier than anywhere elsc. Archacologists Alison Brooks and John Yellen have
uncovered at Katanda in former Zaire bone harpoons and other implements which have
been dated ¢.90,000 years old, and are
at more advanced than any Eurasian finds of more

than half that

age. However, this remams an isolated dating is controversral,
find, the and
the significance for claims about African cultural primacy is regarded with great scepticism
by many other scholars, Earlier im the same region, Belgian colonial geologist Jean de
Heinzelin found what he believed to be evidence of a counting system, etched on bones,
which he thought must have been communicated to ancient Egypt. This idea has been
treated scepucally than have Brooks's
even more and Yellen’s finds. See Shreeve (1995:
235-63): Wolpoff and Gaspari (1997; 326-9); and, for an excited, overstated Afrocentric
view of the implications (based largely on Shreeve’s earlier magazine arucles), Finch
(1994),
8. It might also be suggested that wherever in West Asia or North Africa the major
features of ‘civilization’ onginated, the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures interacted so
34 AFROCENTRISM

closely from at the latest 1500 onwards that

nce
they formed
~
~
m
Important ways a
single
civilizational For
9.A reference
complex. a
strong statement
of this view, sce Wilkinson (1993).
to the long-forgotten and academically discredited Giuseppe Sergi, a
late-Victorian ethnologist (see Sergi 1901).
 4

Diasporic Images of Africa

before Afrocentrism

In numerous
popular tracts, pamphlets, published sermons and
occasionally
substantial tomes from the mid nineteenth century to the early twentieth,
African-American a
high proportion of them
writers —

clergymen, the main

‘organic black
intellectuals’ of
communities made reference to ancient-

Egypt. Nubia, Ethiopia and other African civilizations as

part of their

campaign for racial equality and respect. Such mainly litle-known texts,

glorifying ancient Africa, and especially Egypt, included the 1837 publica-
tion of Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political
Condition of the Colored
People,James Pennington's 1841 Text Book of the Origin
and History of the People, Light and Truth by Robert
Colored B. Lewis in 1844;
the 1848 lecture by Henry Highland Garnet issued in
print as The Past and
Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race, William Wells Brown's
1863 The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, James
‘Africanus’ Horton’s West African Countries and Peoples in 1868. From the
1890s the pace of such publication quickened, with such works as the

prolific Joseph E. Hayne’s 1887 The Cushite, his The Black Man of 1894 and
his 1905 The Ammontan Origin of the Ancient Greeks, Cretans and all
or Hametic
the Celtic Races, W.H. Councill’s
1898 Lamp of Wisdom; Or, Race History
Hluminated, Charles T. Walker's 1900 Appeal to Caesar, Baltimore clergyman
Harvey Johnson's 1903 The Nations from a New Pornt of View, Pauline
Hopkins’s 1905 Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Greatness of the African Race,
John William Norris's 1916 The Ethiopian’s Place in. History, and James M.
Webb's The Black Man, the Father of Civilization, Proven by Biblical History, also
the wars, late examples of the genre Dr
published in {916.' Between were

J.E. Blayechettai’s pamphlet The Hidden Mystery of Ethaofira (1926): Drusilla

Dunjce Houston's 1926 Wonderful Ethiomans of the Anctent Cushite [Snpire,
Charles C. Seifert’s booklets lauding black contributions to the visual arts

across the millennia (1938) and the achievements of the fabulist Aesop,
identified as a ‘Negro’ (1946), as well as a more substantial work, Az
Introduction to African Civilizations, co-authored by Willis N. Huggins and
John G, Jackson in 1937, The charismatic Harlem clergyman Adam Clayton
Powell and the hugely popular prosopographer (collective biographer) Joel
of World’s Great Men of Color (1947/1972), took
Augustus Rogers, author up

35
36 AFROGENTRISM

similar themes; as did Marcus Garvey, whose ideas we cxamine more closcly
in a
subsequent chapter.
Some of these were works profound eccentricity, like Augustus T. Bell's
of
obscure, mystical tract The WoollyHair Man of the Ancient South, issued during
Theodore Roosevelt’s Presidency in approximately 1903; or Edward A.

Johnson's {931 Adam versus

Ape-Man and Ethiopia. Some, especially among
the earlier examples of the genre, relied almost entirely on biblical
Others, works of impressive if sometimes Hl
arguments. though, were —

digested autodidact
—

scholarship, seeking to enlist a wide range of histori-

cal, anthropological and theological sources m their campaign for racial
equality and the revision of the white world’s historical judgements.
The very first known Afro-American political texts already contained the
themes which were to re-echo through all the subsequent decades: identifi-
cation with ancient Egypt as a great black civilization, at least partly the
creation of ‘Ethiopians’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Cushites’ or ‘sons of Ham’, belief that
civilization originated in Africa and was carried thence to Greece and the
world; assertion that this past greatness was a source both of racial pride
and of hope for future achievement, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured
Citizens ofthe World in 1829 suggested that:

When we take a
retrospective view of the arts and sciences (we see) the wisc

legislation —

the Pyramids and other magnificent buildings —

the turning of
the channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom

learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece. (quoted in Forbes
1990: 214}

And Walker had insisted on the basic similarity between ancient Egyptians
and African-Americans: they ‘were Africans or coloured people, such as we
are —

some of them yellow and some dark —

a mixture of Ethiopians and the
natives of Egypt ~

about the same as

you see the coloured people of the
United States at the present day’ (Gates and McKay 1997: 183). Hosea
Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character... of the Golored People was, like
Walker’s, primarily an antislavery tract, invoking the African past to refute
assertions of black inferiority. Drawing mainly on the Bible and apparently
on the German scholar Barthold Niebuhr, Easton points to
Egypt, Ethiopia
and Carthage as great ancient African civilizations. The Egyptians had
taught the Greeks, who had beforehand been ‘a race of savages’, as had
Alrican-derived wisdom them via
other Europeans before was
passed on to

Greece and Rome mighty past

(Easton 1837: 9-11). Such African achieve-
ments, despite promise of future
later decline, greatness and
offered

acceptance of racial equality. If others would deal justly towards Africa, then
within a few generations ‘her sons will again take the lead in the fields of
virtuous enterprise’ (ibid: 20). Men like Easton and his contemporary
James Pennington, a black New York clergyman and leading abolitionist
who wrote in similar vein but devoted more
space to Africa and to historical
claims than did Easton, proposed rational arguments
—
albeit based on
 DIASPORICG IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCGENTRISM 37

scanty historical knowledge -

about the African past and its possible
significance for the future.

Pennington’s Text Book of the Origins... of the Colored People (1841) was, as

its title implies, intended as an educational primer, ‘offered to families, and

to students and lecturers in
history'(3). It adopted an almost exclusively
biblical and creationist framework, secking, on numerous
theological
grounds, to rebut ideas that Africans were the ‘children of Cain’ or
subject
to ‘Noah's curse’ (ibid. 7-9).2 Rather, Negroes were the descendants of
Cush, which meant that there was biblical for the idea of their
with ancient
support
‘were cousins.
consanguinity Egyptians: they They were

brother's children’ (21). Moreover, they came under the same government
and soon became one people, ‘equals in the arts and sciences for which
Egypt is admitted on all hands to have been so renowned’ (22). Thus ‘the
arts and sciences had their origin with our ancestors, and from them have
flown forth to the world. They gave them to Greece, Greece to Rome, and
Rome to others’ (47). Pennington is careful, however, to distinguish
between ‘Ethiopian’ (a racial ‘Negro’) and ‘African’
label synonymous with
(a geographical one). widespread later habit among
Thus -

contrary to the

Afro-American publicists of claiming the whole continent’s history as their

heritage he insisted
—

that the Carthaginians, for instance, ‘cannot, in any

proper sense, be considered Ethiopians, and therefore that we have no

proper connection with them’ (27), The ancient achievements of Egypt and

Ethiopia alone, though, were enough to prove the intellectual equality of

the races (45). If there had been degeneration among Africans from the

glorious past, as Pennington seemed to admit, it was on account of

polytheism and idolatry (32). Slavery could not be justified on

grounds of
the character of Africans (39), or as natural, any more than it had biblical
sanction: the ‘prejudice against color’ was entirely
American irrational as

well as irreligious, tending to breed injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy and heathen-

ism in the entire nation (74-96).
Another, more
prominent Afro-American publicist of the era, again a

clergyman and militant abolitionist, who drew on a mixture of biblical and

historical arguments to proclaim past African glories, was Henry Highland
Garnet? His The Past and Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race
(1848) declared African descent from Ham, while rejecting allegations that
this ancestry placed black
legitimating slavery (1848:
people under a curse

7); lauded the Egyptians and other noteworthy

achievements of the ancient
Africans such as Hannibal and St Augustine; and anticipated a theme which
was later often to be claborated by pointing out that when ancient Africans
were scaling the peaks of civilization, ‘the ancestors of the now proud and
boasting Anglo-Saxons were among the most degraded in the human family’
(ibid.: 12). And the formidable Alexander Crummell, in his collection of
sermons
published as The future of Africa (1862), msisted that no race had a

monopoly of cultural achievement, which indeed was

always a
product of
cross-fertilization and mutual learning.”
Far less rational or careful was Robert B, Lewis, also writing in the 1840s.
38 AFROCENTRISM

Lewis may perhaps be regarded as the true father of Afrocentrism’s wilder

theories, for he proposed, in Immanuel Geiss’s (1974) summary,” that:

Athens was founded by an

Egyptian Bc and
in Macedonia
1556 by a
descendant of ‘Hercules, an African’; Europe and the whole of
Greece,
America were
originally settled by descendants of the Egyptians; the Indians
were related to the Israelites of Egypt; Syrians, Greeks, Phoenicians and
Romans were all negroid.

Practically every Antiquity, from Euclid to Jesus Christ, was

major figure of
of African descentA latter-day variant of this theme
(ibid.: has been
102-3).
to claim African ancestry for a striking range of more modern figures
—

Beethoven, Browning and Marx being especial favourites as well as to —

the alleged Africanity of people with even the most distant or

highlight
minor trace of black like Pushkin or Dumas.” Parallel assertions
ancestry,
about famous individuals of the ancient world have continued to recur,

based usually on litte more than surmise or wishful thinking with the —

as

‘blackness’ of Socrates, Cleopatra, or

Augustine of Hippo (Lefkowitz 1996a:
26-48).
A few white authors echoed similar themes. As carly as 1852 a while
abolitionist, the Reverend F, Freeman, in a book called Africa’s Redemption,
cast in the form of dramatic dialogue which was a standard abolitionist
had expressed the idea at length through his hero’s words:
trope,

have heard of ‘the fame of wisdom ~

It may greatly startle some who Egypt’s . .

that Egyptians were in fact black and curly-headed. . . -

{T]hat very light which long since blazed before the world in Greece and
Rome, and which now rises to its noonday splendor under the auspices of

Christianity in and America kindled the dark shores of

Europe ... was on

Africa. (quoted in Hickey and Wylic 1993: 240—41)

Freeman cited sources from the Greek historian Herodotus to the eighteenth-
French antiquarian Constantin Volney’ to support his argument for
century
both the of ancient
blackness Egypt and the formative Egyptian influence
on classical
European civilization. Thus a white and by no —

means

particularly radical clergyman had already,

—
in 1852, expressed most of the

major themes of 1990s Afrocentrism.

In the 1860s the pioneer Pan-Africanist James ‘Africanus’ Horton, in his
West African Countries and Peoples (subtitled ‘A Vindication of the African
Race’) also argued that ancient Africa had been the birthplace of civiliza-
tion. His view was less singlemindedly Egyptocentric than those of most
writers in this vein. He emphasized, in the usual way, the debt of Greece
and Rome to African knowledge, but also that of carly Christianity, since
‘fathers and writers of the Primitive Church, were tawny African bishops of
Apostolic renown’ (Horton 1868: 67).
Probably the most important thinker in these ninctcenth-century circles
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 39

was Edward Wilmot Blyden. Inspired by a desire to sce evidence of great

black achievements, he visited Egypt in 1866. At the sight of the Pyramids,
he wrote, awe overtook him:

This, thought I, was the work of my African progenitors. Feelings came ...

over me far different from those I have ever feltwhen looking at the mighty
works of European genius. I felt that | had a peculiar heritage in the Great
Pyramid built... by the enterprising sons of Ham, from which I

descended. ... I seemed to feel the impulse from those stirring characters
who sent civilization to Greece ... could my voice have reached every African
in the world, I would have earnestly addressed him ... ‘Retake your Fame’,

(quoted in Lynch 1967; 55)

Blyden’s semi-mystical and ethnic-absolutist ideas anticipated those which

are now the common currency of Afrocentrism. He believed that ‘every
race... has a soul, and the soul of the race finds expression in its
institutions, and to kill those institutions is to kill the soul... No people
be helped under institutions which not the outcome of
can
profit by or are

their own character’ (quoted in Davidson 1964: 35)." In other respects,

though, his views were more
gencrously inclusive than those of many later
cultural nationalists: he expressed highly positive attitudes towards Jews
(Gilroy 1993a: 210-11) and more particularly towards Islam, to which he
looked as a
major vehicle for regenerating Africa (Lynch 1967: 67-71, 73-7,
124).
It is noteworthy that some of these carly proponents of the ‘Black Athena’
idea drew from it radically different lessons from those advanced by
contemporary Afrocentrists: lessons about the necessity of cultural intes-

change and syncretism. Leading black abolitionist Williams Wells Brown

argued thus:

As the Greeks, and Romans and Jews drew knowledge from the Egyptians
three thousand years ago, and the Europeans received it from the Romans,
so must the blacks in this land rise in the same way. As one learns from one

another, so nation learns from nation. (Brown 1863: 36)

Brown thought that all Africans originated in the Nile valley, and so all
shared in this interchange of progress. His major thrust, like that of many
other nineteenth-century black writers, was to refute accusations of African
Most of the material by which he sought to do this took the form
incapacity.
of a series of min-biographies of blacks with notable achievements in his
own time: Benjamin Banneker, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crum-
mell, slave revolt leader Nat Turner (a bold choice of exemplar for an Afro-
American writing in the midst of the Civil War!), Toussaint L’Ouverture
and other Haitian revolutionaries, the poet Phillis Wheatley, and so on. Yet
Brown also, more briefly, made a case for ancient African
accomplishments,
to establish the point that ‘The negro has not always been considered as the
40 AFROCENTRISM

inferior race. The time was when he stood at the head of science and
literature’ (32). This was proved, of course, by ancient Egypt ~

which, citing
the familiar authorities of Herodotus and Volney, he believed to be a
Negro
civilization. Such early African greatness was contrasted —

in another trope
which Garnet and Crummell had already employed, and which was to be
repeated time and again thereafter —

with the primitive savagery of the early

Anglo-Saxons to which Roman authors bore witness (33-5).
The first major scholarly historical work by a black American was also the
first serious study of the history of black Americans: Geor; Washington
Williams’s 1882 History of the Negro Race m America, The
ge bulk of the
main
book was devoted to the str uggles and achievements of Africans in the New
World, and on this theme it was a remarkable
piece of research for its time:
Williams noted proudly that he had consulted over twelve thousand sources,

about a thousand of which were mentioned in his footnotes (Williams 1882:

vi). A preliminary section, however, gave an outline of African history itself,
and this perhaps inevitably less securely grounded
was than the later

chapters. Williams began in the fashion which had already become conven-

tional, underlining the ‘Unity of Mankind’ and refuting the idea of a ‘curse
of Canaan’ (ibid.: 6-11). His references to ancient history were sketchy, but
included the similarly standard claim that Egyptians’ origins came from the
south, referring to Meroé as ‘that ancient city, the very cradle of
Egyptian
civilization’ (6). He also
anticipated much later both European
and Afro-American, speaking of prehistoric ‘Negroes’ in
m
speculation, India, Japan and
elsewhere (17-19). Relying heavily on Herodotus, as so
many Afrocentric
authors have done up to the present (c.g. 13, 15), Williams asserted not that
the ancicnt Egyptians were a
‘Negro’ population as such, but that they were

very dark and inchided a substantial

‘Negro’ element (14, 445-6), and that
many of their kings were Ethiopians; and he provided a list of these kings
(454—9). He did, however, insist that the Cushites (or Nubians), the true

originators of civilization, were identical to the Ethiopians, and were true

Negroes (6-7), and he made the usual assertion of a chain of cultural

influences running down the Nile and over to carly Europe:

Greece and Rome stood transfixed before the ancient glory of Ethiopia!
Homeric mythology borrowed its very essence from Negro hicroglyphics;
Egypt borrowed her light from the venerable Negroes up the Nile. (22)

Williams was less impressed by what he knew of West African cultures: no

doubt partly because his sole sources on them seem to have been European
travellers’ and conquerors’ accounts.” He mentioned some of the major
West African states and empires —

Benin, Ashanti, Yoruba, Dahomey

(23-44) —
but his view of the last in particular was far from favourable; he
writes of bloodthirstiness, cruelty and human sacrifice. Like so
many other

nineteenth-century publicists —-

and not a few later ones —

Williams felt that

some
explanation was needed not only for supposed African backwardness
but for what he perceived as a
degeneration of African culture from its past
 DIASPORIG IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 41

heights. His involved several

interpretation elements. Part was religious:
‘what was
Negro’s fall from his high state of civilization?
the cause of the It
was
forgetfulness of God, idolatry? (24: the point is not expanded, but

repeated elsewhere, e.g. 109). He pointed, as one might expect, to the

corruption and destruction wrought by European incursions (67); though
he had nothing but praise for the efforts of Christian missions in Africa. He
also, however, put forward an idiosyncratic theory of racial degeneration.
As the noble original Africans spread from their Nile valley homes to less

hospitable climates, they declined physically and mentally into what Euro-
pean contemporarics scorned and Williams, surprisingly, concurred with —

them as the—

lowly ‘Negro type’:

The Negro type is the result of degradation. It is nothing more than the
lowest strata of the African race.
Pouring over the vencrable mountain
terraces, an abundant stream from an abundant and unknown source, Into
the malarial districts, the genuine African has gradually degenerated into the

typical Negro. His poisonblood his

infected with the of his low habitation,
body shrivelled by disease, his intellect veiled in pagan superstitions, the
noblest yearnings of his soul strangled by the savage passions of a nature
abandoned to sensuality the poor Negro of Africa deserves more
-
our
pity
than our
contempt. (109)

The slave trade ~—

which, he thought, singled out for transportation the

weakest members of the lowliest West African tribes —

merely compounded
this negative process of natural selection: hence what he saw as the generally

poor intellectual and moral character of Afro-Americans. Given all this, it

might scem surprising that Williams felt as able as he did to point to

impressive achievements among the more

‘progressive’ members of the race

in America, and to offer such

hope for their future. The reason lay in his

burning faith in the civilizing, moralizing power of a Western —

and, above
all, a Christian —

environment. Colonialism and slavery had at Icast

brought
truc religion to Africans, and in the United States, after Emancipation, the
road to racial equality and assimilation lay open. And the ex-slaves would in
their play the key
turn, role in bringing civilization to Africa, as they were

already doing in Sierra Leone and Liberia, those ‘light-houses on a dark

and stormy sea of lost humanity’ (110).
Such themes had, as historian Leo Spitzer notes, strong resonances

carly ‘Creole’ victims of the slave trade and thew

among
intellectuals
(repatriated
in Sierra Leone and Liberia themselves. One
descendants)
anonymous writer in a Sicrra Leonean newspaper urged: ‘Let it not be

forgotten that we are the direct descendants of men that have built those

stupendous Pyramids which have in all ages exacted wonder and admiration,
and have baffled the most skilful of modern architects’ (Spitzer 1972: 121).
In his Africa and the Africans (1881) Charles Marke proclaimed that ancient

Africa was filled ‘with churches, colleges, and repositories of learning ...

and... was the scat of a most powerful government which contended with
42 AFROGENTRISM

Rome for the sovereignty of the world’ (in ibid.; 121). J. Augustus Cole,
visiting Indiana from Sierra Leone, urged that ancient Egyptians were black
Africans; while A.B.C. Merriman-Labor suggested that modern West Afri-
cans were descended from Ethiopians, who were themselves descended
from Cush, the son of Ham (ibid.). The Cushites had founded such great
cities as Nineveh and Babylon, and were chosen by God ‘to be the primitive
leaders of the van of civilization and to teach mankind the first principles of
(quoted in ibid. 122). Merriman-Labor, with like-
good government’
minded West African publicists such as Abayomi Cole and Africanus Horton,
had once been the leaders of
proposed a cyclical view of history. Africans
world civilization, a role which had passed from them to various successors
~
most recently the British but which, the wheel turning again, they might
—

hope to regain. Like the Afrocentrists today, they tended towards a view of

history defined in strictly racial terms, including strong preconceptions

about who precisely should count as a true African. Thus Merriman-Labor
excluded ‘Copts, Berbers, Kaffirs and Hottentots’, with their ‘ycllowish’ or
‘brownish’ skins, from his providential schema (in ibid.: 127).
Meanwhile, the flow of Afro-American essays in racial vindication con-

tinued into the new century. William Hooper Councill’s Lamp of Wisdom
its announced, intended ‘standard textbook for the
was, publishers as a

Negro schools throughout our beautiful Southland’ (1898: 6). The author
himself, President of the ‘Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes’
in Normal, Alabama, and one of the cra’s most accommodationist. black
its educational inseparable from that of
public figures,’? saw purpose as

racial uplift:

I that by the light of this little ‘Lamp of Wisdom’ the world may see
hope
more clearly the merits of the Negro, and accord him a man’s chance in the

race of life and that the Negro himself may take fresh courage and press
forward to grander achievements. (ibid.: 5)

Discussion of Africa in the book, which is cast largely in question-and-answer

form, is relatively brief. There is a basic list of the continent’s natural
features and resources (9-13), a bald assertion that Afro-Americans are

descended from the ‘ancient Ethiopians’, the partners of Pharaonic Egypt

(16), and the usual rebuttal of the idea that blacks are subject to a biblical
curse (14-16). Far more
space is given to American history, much of it
and black achievements in America, with
strikingly inaccurate, to listing
business stories and extended puff for
special emphasis on success an

Councill’s own school.

Much more giving much
radical, more attention
and to Africa and its

Harvey Johnson'sis The Nations from a New Point of View (1903).

past glories,
Johnson, pastor of the Union Baptist Church in Baltimore and holder of a
Doctorate in Divinity, started as usual with biblical history, before turning
civilization via extended discussions of race
to the iniquities of modern
theory. Asserting that all Africans, including both ancient Egyptians and the
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 43

forebears of Afro-Americans, are ‘Hamites’ —

an affirmation supported
largely by biblical Johnson proceeded: ‘Greek
citations -
and Roman art

and literature —

yes, and that of all Europe and America at the present day
—

is of African origin; yes, the original production of the Hamites’ (ibid.:

89).
Carthage was a
Negro, not a Phoenician, city, while Rome was settled and
civilized by Carthage (104-14). Hebrew, Greek and Latin were all, in origin,
Hamitic languages (117). Greece, too, was an African creation (228-37);
though Johnson admits that he is
speculating somewhat in
claiming that
‘the Hamites that Fg and Phoenicians first settled the country,
‘Byptians
—

is,
—

and the white tribes came in and settled afterwards’ (231). Johnson was
evidently more
widely read than the majority of Afro-American publicists in
this vein: he seemed to be well acquainted, for instance, with the racial
theories of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, on which he launched repeated
attacks. He was also a vivid, punchy, sometimes witty writer, who pointed
out sardonically that Europeans bad historically been slaves long before
blacks were (123), and concluded with a rather wonderful satiric diatribe
on the failings and follies of white socicty, from the medieval European
habit of puttmg animals on criminal trial (278-9) (o the corruptions of Wall
Street. Given this history, he suggested, the question so often asked of
Africans should be thrown back upon Europe
—
can they ever
really be
trusted to govern or civilize themselves?
More naive and repetitive in style ~

though also more historically detailed

~
was the contribution of another Baltimore clergyman, John William
Norris. His 1916 tract The Hthiopian’s Place m History ran through the
standard litany of claims: a bibiical explanation of humanity's division into
races, uneasily coupled with an invocation of Darwin In support of the view
that ‘everything indicates that the origin of man was in Africa’ (Norris 1916:
2); the assertion that ‘fourteen Ethiopian Kings ruled on the Egyptian
throne’ (ibid.: 1); and an insistence that Egyptians were black, and that
Greece learned its wisdom from them:

Superficial criticism, guided by local and temporary prejudices, has

attempted to deny the intimate relations of the Negro with the great historic
races of Egypt and Ethiopia. But no one who has travelled in North-Eastern
Africa or
among the ruins on the banks of the Nile, will for a moment doubt
that there was the connection, not of an accident or of adventitious
circumstances, but of consanguinity between the races of inner Africa of the

present day and the ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians. (5)

The Pyramids, which

constantly returns
to as benchmarksNorris of African
achievernent, partly of Negro construction;
were at which
least ‘shows that
the Negro had attained to a very high mark of civilization three thousand
years before the birth of Christ’. Greece, the first civilized European nation,
rose only a thousand years later, and under African tutelage (8-9), “Phe
white man never conceived civilization. He has tried to improve on it; or on
44 AFROCENTRISM

Hamitic conception. ... The white man claims superiority in all civilizations,
but there is no evidence of it’ (10). Cecrops, a
Negro descendant of the
biblical Mizraim, founded Athens and brought culture to Greece (20-21).
The wisdom and religion of the Jews, too, were of African origin (34-8).
Originally, all humans had been of one colour ~
and Norris implied, without
directly claiming, that this colour was black. Later migrations into varying
climates produced the differentiation of races (which is, of course, almost
certainly true) (23). Appealing to Afro-American youth to
recapture past
greatness, Norris proclaimed:

Your foundation, boys, is the civilization that produced the Pyramids. But,
says the
young black man, that is too far back. Is it? Well there is where you
will build. God left the Pyramids as a mark of your rock base. (33)

The British-based black autodidact Theophilus Scholes likewise, in urging

that ‘The corner-stone of the world’s civilization was laid by the Negro’,
insisted that all social advance was the result) of cultural contact, of

borrowings and interactions. Scholes is perhaps the most interesting of all

these authors. Born in Jamaica in 1856, he had trained as a doctor in

Edinburgh and Brussels and worked as a

missionary in the Congo, also
spending Nigeria and apparently
time in the teaching at African Training
Institute Colwyn Bay,inWales (P. Bryan 1991: 47-51; Fryer 1984: 438-9).
His main interest in his voluminous writings was criticism of British colonial
policies, and especially the prejudice which barred educated blacks from
the employment or the social respect which was their duc. His was
primarily,
then, an elite and class-specific desire for reform, like that of most carly
West Indian and West African critics of colonialism in his
day. Like almost
all the others he was calling for the liberalization of the Empire rather than
its total abolition —

indeed, he compared British policies favourably with the

more extreme racial stratification of the US South (Scholes 1899: 378-9).
In
Glimpses of the Ages Scholes presented a detailed, rational defence of
the unity of the human race and the Africans’ unique contribution to its

development. The main difficulty with his argument from the perspective —

of 1905, when he wrote it, and today is that he

even morc so from that of —

insisted on linking religiously-grounded polemic against Darwinism

this to a

(Scholes 1905 I: 154-64). Apart from that idiosyncrasy, Scholes’s main lines
of argument were eminently reasonable. He pointed out, quite rightly, that
all the different groups identified by his contemporaries as clistinct ‘races’
had great internal variations of colour and physical features, and that the
still-influential ‘science’ of craniology had failed to
prove differences in
brain size between racial groups (ibid.: 35, 49-52), He accepted —

indeed,
lauded the current pre-eminence of Europeans world stage, but on the
—

pointed out that within recorded history European ‘savages’ had been much
more
primitive than African ones, as Roman writings about the Britons,
Gauls and Germans showed (174-90, 395). He proceeded from this to
make the now-familiar arguments about the blackness of the ancient
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 45

Egyptians (191-209) and the great achievements of Egyptian civilization,

including its role as tutor to Greece: ‘the adoption by the Greeks of these
sciences and arts has directly and indirectly made the Egyptians the
educators of modern Europe’ (235; see also 337).
Reversing familiar European polaritics, as so many black vindicationist
writers did, Scholes divided human civilizations into the ‘spontancous’ and
the ‘imitative’, Egypt, with China and Ethiopia, fell into the first category;
Europe into the second: ‘Europe has produced no indigenous civilisation’
(323), but had drawn everything from Africa.
Scholes was a strong believer in the ideology of progress, which for him
was the naturalthings. order of that
In his own time, however, he feared
world regressing, in defiance
civilization was of the natural order, because
of the ‘lack of truth’ in public affairs, especially in relation to race (xv). He
saw his task as to challenge and remedy this, casting a truthful light on the
capacities of the various races. His centrepiece was ancient Egypt, but he
also pointed to the ‘progressive’ nature of some African peoples in the
present (249), and to the achievements of Afro-Americans
(251-64) and of

‘great leaders of the Negro race’ (264-80). end, he averred,

In the it was

moral rather than material progress which really mattcred, and here blacks
were
showing the way to the future. He intended, he said, to follow up his
two stout volumes on racial history with a further four tracing the moral
issucs raised by race relations (vol. Il: vii, ix, 488).
Apparently he never

completed these: certainly they never found a

publisher.
Many other black writers around the same time mace related arguments.
In a massive work published in 1913, TheAfrican Abroad, William H. Ferris

emphasized the blackness of ancient Ethiopia, and argued that civilization

spread from thereEgypt and thence onward.

to Ferris, a graduate of both
Yale and Harvard philosophy and theology as weil as a close associate
in and
admirer of Du Bois, here produced an
extraordinary mixed-genre compen-
dium of history, philosophy, autobiography and contemporary political
comment. ‘All Iam or ever hope to be is expressed in this volume,’ he
wrote (Ferris 1913: surprisingly, it swikes the latter-day reader
131); and, not

as the
product of a intelligence. In so far as the book
brilliant but unfocused
has a unifying theme, beyond a general assertion of black dignity, it comes
from the influence of Hegel, Emerson and Carlyle, a philosophy of history
centred on the notion of heroism.'' Apparently the only point on which
Ferris publicly disagreed with Du Bois, whom he revered, was over the
latter’s famous 1897 pamphlet “The Conservation of Races’. Du Bois thought
that great individuals became so because of the collective racial forces they
represented. On the contrary, said Ferris, only outstanding individuals made
races or nations great (D. Lewis 1993; 173).
In line with this general theory, Ferris devoted considerable space to the
nature of historical greatness among both whites
particularly, and, more

blacks: in an extensive section entitled Negro as Hero’ he discussed

“The
his candidates for the list of ‘the forty greatest Negroes in History’ (Ferris
1913: 927-80). These included Thothmes I and Amenhotep IIH of Egypt,
46 AFROCENTRISM

the sixtcenth-century West African emperor Mohammed Askia (‘the African

Charlemagne’), the Islamic scholars Ahmed Baba and Abderrahman Sadi
of Timbuktu, and various modern figures.
Ferris’s general approach was vindicationist, but it was far from being
unmodified boosterism. He bemoaned the lack of regard for intellectual
attainments he discerned among Afro-Americans, and the fact that his race

had, in his view, ‘produced so

many good talkers and so few good writers’
(ibid.; 255). Indeed, racial stereotypmg and essentialism, sometimes

uncomfortably similar to then current dominant white views ‘Negro’ of

characteristics, are by no means absent from his book (e.g. 244-6). His
boldest hopes were reserved for those people of mixed descent whom he
called ‘NegroSaxons', who might combine the finer qualities of the two

racial (ch. XIV passim).

lineages
Ferris’s views of Africa and its ancicut combined some standard
past
themes of the tradition, such as that Greece ‘derivedgenius the of her
civilization’ from Egypt (431), with a more
singular version of racial
history.” He endorsed Sergi’s theory of a
prehistoric ‘Mediterranean race’
but, unlike most, denied its whiteness: the inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa
were an offshoot of it, they, the Arabs, Phoenicians,
so that Homeric Greeks
and Etruscans closely related.
were all The usual bugbear question of
whether the ancient Egyptians were ‘Negroes’ thus diminished in signifi-
cance —

he described Egyptians, Ethiopians (or Nubians) and Negroes as

three distinct but closely related groups, and certainly none of them was

white:

{T]he Ethiopians ... were neither Negroes nor

Egyptians. But they were a

mixed or colored race the same as the colored people of America. They
represented a
blending of the Hamites, a Caucasian race who settled in
North Africa and Egypt, and Negroes; or they were a branch of the
Mediterranean race from which the Negroes were an offshoot. (463)

Ferris's historical and interestingly

anthropological influences were an

mixed bunch. Apart from standbys of Afro-

Sergi he drew on those favourite
American Egyptology, then and since, Herodotus and Volney; he made
much use of craniology (though he also acknowledged the influence of
Franz Boas, the main contemporary critic of skull measurement as a means

of racial classification [429-30]); and quoted extensively from then-standard

authorities on ancient history like professors W.C. Taylor of Dublin and

George Rawlinson of Oxford.

George W. Ellis, writing just a year later, while he also laid stress on Egypt
as a
probable centre from which cultural influences diffused, broke newer

ground in lauding ancient Ghana and other West African kingdoms. His
main purpose and focus, though, were not historical but to describe and

praise the achievements of the Vai people of Liberia, where he had been
stationed as a
diplomat. His work thus took its place in the already
substantial Afro-American tradiGen of defending Liberia's reputation
 DIASPORIG IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 47

white disparagers, but also stood as a pioneering albeit uncritical — —

against
pieceof anthropological fieldwork by a black American (Ellis 1914).
Many of the texts already mentioned included discussion, usually brief, of
ideas drawn from physical anthropology whether, by way of selective
—

citation, to support their arguments or more often, given the gencrally

—

racist tenor of the European anthropological tradition to attack such -

theorics. A few Afro-American writers plunged more deeply into this field,
seeking to turn the claims of ninetcenth-century physical anthropology so —

much of which was devoted to establishing African inferiority on their -

heads, or to prove the ‘Negroid’ character of ancient Egypt. As we shall see,

this, too, is a tradition which has continued until the present day, above all
through the influence of Cheikh Anta Diop. Such
Joseph efforts included
E. Hayne’s flowery, amateurish The Black Man; or, the Natural History of the
Hamuiic Race (1894) and the more extensive effort by veteran campaigner
Martin R. Delany; though the latter's Principia of Ethnology (1880), despite
the scientific pretensions of its utle and the wide knowledge it reflected,
actually relied almost as much on the old biblical arguments as it did on a

critical examination of the ecra’s race science. Delany's main purpose

appeared to be to reiterate his long-held view that New World blacks should
emigrate en masse back to Africa.
In some such writings the ‘cradle of civilization’ was pushed further south
down the Nile, and Ethiopia was identified as the real source of Egyptian

achievements, just as Egypt was of Greece's. This emphasis on Ethiopia had

a
triple function. First, Ethiopians (vagueness was, as it had long been,
endemic over whether the label referred to the Amharic state or to Africans
more generally) were less contestably ‘black’ than Egyptians, especially at a

time when the academic mainstream sought to proclaim the latter as

Hamitic, perhaps Aryan. Second,

or links could be drawn both with the
scattered Biblicalreferences to Ethiopia and with the country’s deep-rooted
Christian faith both moves
—
with evident appeal to intensely religious Afro-
American publicists." Third, the continued political independence of

Abyssinia, its successful repulsion of attempted colonial conquest by Italy,

presented an inspiring contemporary message. All these themes were later
to motivate identification with Ethiopia among a wide
range of heterodox
and syncretic religious movements in the New World, most famously in
Rastafarianism.'
J.E. Blayechettai, a clergyman who claimed to be an Ethiopian prince who
had been kidnapped by the ‘Dervishes’, to have escaped and received an

English education,'® was

apparently an extremely popular lecturer on the
black Church circuit in the 1920s. His pamphlets The Pen of an African
(c.1922) and The Hidden Mystery of Ethaopia (¢.1926) repeated the by now
familiar themes that the arts and sciences had originated among the

Ethiopians, who: ‘were the first people to throw the flashlight of knowledge
upon the shores of Egypt. Egypt handed it to Babylon, Babylon handed it to
Grecce, Greece handed it to Rome, and Rome handed it down to the
western world’ (1922: 36). He linked this with the missionary endeavour:
48 AFROCENTRISM

like Pennington, Williams and other precursors, he believed that Africa had
lost its earlierpre-eminence through abandoning God, and could have it
restored by embracing Christianity though if Blayechettai were
—

indecd of

Ethiopian birth, he could hardly have been unaware that Ethiopia was
already Christian, and had been so for many centuries.
Edward A. Johnson's Adam versus
Ape-Man and Ethiopia was a much more
substantial but sal] more eccentric work. Opening with an extended,
confusing and,
~

indeed, apparently confused comparison —

between
creationist and evolutionary theories of human origins, he seemed to want

to have it both ways: both theories supported claims that Ethiopia was the
cradle of humanity, and of civilization. The Garden of Eden, he suggested,
had been located at the source of the Nile; though he also said it extended
from there as far as Mesopotamia, and blended this assertion with ideas
about lost continents Johnson 1931: 25-34). Everything had radiated from
there, he proposed, in an account drawing on the extreme Egyptocentric
diffusionist Grafton Elliot Smith, on Herodotus and Volney, and on the
more
reputable authority of W.E.B. Du Bois. Egyptran culture was the
creation of Ethiopia, as is proved by the racial features of the Sphinx (ibid.:
‘a colony of the
158-9). Egypt was in fact no more than mighty Ethiopians’
(165), though Europeans have conspired to credit Ethiopian accomplish-
ments to Egypt, entirely ignoring Ethiopia’s antiquity and glory, its status as

the birthplace of all knowledge (272).

George Wells Parker, in 1918, not only anticipated later reverse-racist
antitheses between benevolent African ‘Sun People’ and malign European
‘Ice People’ in his The Children of the Sun, but argued that the ancient Greeks
were not only indebted to Africa but were African, at least in the Homeric

age.'® As Parker put it, in language which echoed his era’s African-American
colour-caste hierarchies of ‘yellows’, ‘browns’ and ‘blacks’, the ‘great
Grecian epics were
epics of an African people and Helen, the cause of the

‘Trojan war, must henceforth be conceived as a beautiful brown skin girl

(quoted in Winters 1994: 1'77).'7

A similar kind of racial romanticism found expression a few years later in
Drusilla Dunjee Houston's Wonderfil Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire
(1926/1985). Houston (1876-1941), a schoolteacher and journalist who

spent most of her life in Oklahoma City, had apparently been inspired by
W.E.B. Du Bois'’s The Negro, but her own work displayed little of Du Bots’s
care and caution. Wonderfil Ethiopians was projected as the first of three
volumes, of which the latter two were
seemingly completed, but never
published, and were
subsequently lost.!“ It announced that the ‘Ancient
Gushite Empire of Ethiopians’ had spread its influence across the Middle
East, central Asia and India, as well as creating Egyptian civilization and

providing Greece and Rome with their pantheon of gods. [t was ‘either the
successor or the most famous branch of the Atlantic race’ (ibid.: 5),
suggested Houston in a formulation which revealed the influence (direct or
indirect) of Leo Frobentus’s far-fetched theories. The historic greatness of
the Cushites could still be seen today: observing modern Nubia, ‘we can
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 49

plainly see in the inhabitants their superiority to the common Egyptian

type’ (32) —

though it remained quite unclear how Houston, who had not,

apparently, visited Africa, knew this. Much of the historical legacy, however,
had been lost; and as Houston lamented (in language which revealed how
far she, unlike many later Afrocentrists, identified herself with ideas of
Western civilization), some of the destruction of Egyptian monuments was

the work of ‘Englishmen and Americans, to the everlasting shame of our

claim to culture’ (91, emphasis added).

Varying the usual identification with Ethiopians, Nubians or
Egyptians, the
founded Noble Drew Ali m Newark, New
Moorish Science Temple, by Jersey,
in 1913, proclaimed that African-Americans were descended from the
ancient ‘Moors’, or Moroccans (Gardell 1996: 37-46; McCloud 1995:
10-18). Ali's movement —

through which, it is estimated, at least 15,000

Americans had passed by 1950, as (often rather temporary) adherents, whose
successors in the 1990s may stil have numbered as many as 40,000 —

was the
first of numerous, usually highly heterodox ‘Islamic’ movements flourishing
in black America during the first half of this century. It was the most Africa-
centred of these, though Ali’s belief in ancestral Afro-American affinity to

Morocco could never command widespread credibility. His organization,

and other early US ‘Islamic’ groups, were to be largely overshadowed by the
Nation of Islam, founded in 1930 by the mysterious Wali Fard Muhammad.
If the tradition of Afro-American interest in and glorification of Egypt is

long, it is also subject to its own kind of retrospective romanticization. Thus

James G. Spady, seeking lincage of black American

to trace a Egyptology ~

which, he suggests, Diop was much the poorer for not knowing
Cheikh Anta
-

includes some extremely marginal figures. He cites two ‘outstanding

century’, Norbert Rillicux and
pioneer black Egyptologists of the nineteenth
H. 1989; 294), French-educated Rillicux a noted
John Johnson (Spady was

engineer who no doubt deserves to be better remembered for his achieve-

ments in that sphere, but the only apparent evidence that he was even

merested in ancient Egypt is the report of an acquaintance that he once found

Rillicux looking at hieroglyphs in a Paris library! Johnson, a free Afro-
American in antebellum Georgia, was a popular polemicist who lectured in
Atlanta in the 1840s on ‘The Ancient Black Egyptians, Originators of the Arts
and Sciences’ (Spady 1989: 295-6). Spady cites a number of other names,

without offering evidence that any of them had a serious knowledge of

ancient Africa or could
—
have had, in the segregated education system of
their day. He also drags in at length, as a kind of proto-Diopian, the pioncer
black historian Leo Hansberry (ibid.: 297-304),!" In fact Hansberry, though
he had an interest in the Edhiopian past, neither wrote on ancient Egypt nor
shared any of the irrationalist impulses of the Afrocentrists and Egyptomanes.
He was not only the first Afro-Aincrican, but one of the very first Americans,
to have a close research interest in African history. Ego-boosting myths of
black Pharaohs and bygene glories, however, played no part in this.”"
Both black and white writers, American and African! missionary and
secular, took up different varietics of the theme that West Africans —

or (as
50 AFROCENTRISM

in the ‘Hamitic which shall discuss later) their ruling elites,

hypothesis’, we

or major elements originated of their cultures —

outside the region itself,

the Nile valley being the most popular starting point. Some had other

Equiano believed the Igho lost tribe of Isracl,

suggestions: Olaudah were a

and Africanus Horton seemed to (Zachernuk 1994: 435-6).

James agree
But most Egypt's primacy with Henry Highland Garnet, who
concurred on

complained in 1848 that the new Eurepean scholarship of his day was ‘by
an almost common consent determined to pilfer Africa of her glory’ by
...

denying that Egypt was ‘Africa's dark browed queen’ (quoted in ibid.: 433).
In the early twenticth ceniury, however, scholarly Afro-American
more

views of African history did begin to emerge, notably in the writings of W.E.B.
Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Woodson, the generally acknowledged
founder of African-American history as a professional discipline, had a
lifelong interest in though his major research
Africa even projects never
centred there. Like most black contemporaries who took note of the issue at
all, he was concerned to underline the Africanness of Egypt and its import-
ance for the carly development of civilization, But his approach was radically
distinct from that of later racial romantics in several respects. He emphasized
as a ‘mixed’ civilization, a ‘crucible of cultures
ancient Egypt’s character . ..

a land of mixed breeds or persons comparable to Negroes passing in this

country (the USA) as people of color’ (Woodson 1922: 5; see also Woodson
1936). His polemical book The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) has been
claimed as a crucial precursor of Afrocentrism even, by Gerald Early, as ~—

‘the central work of the Afrocentric movement by a black American writer’

(1995: 37). Yet although its fierce denunciations of the way in which
misrepresentation of the black past in United States schools had produced
subservience or even self-hatred among African-Americans are congenial to
later Afrocentrists —

indeed, the Farrakhan movement, among others,

endorses and promotes reprints of Mis-Kducation -
Woodson neither
placed
special emphasis on the ancient African past, nor advocated separatism or
counter-mythographies glory. His central
of lost African complaint was that
the American educational to give a ue account of blackfailed
history:
system
but it was mainly a teaching of black American history for which he called,
and to which he devoted his life, not that of ancient Egypt or Nubia.
Perhaps above all, Woodson always expressed himself with due scholarly
caution. He had clear views on
political and racial justice, which indeed
motivated his whole life's work: but he distinguished these from what he

frequently called, in the usual language of historiography at that time, a

‘scientific’ approach to history-writing. As his friend A.A. Taylor said after
his death, he ‘divorced scholarship from leadership per se, refusing to
function either primarily or
specifically as a race leader’ (quoted in Meier
and Rudwick 1986: 11).
There can be little doubt that almost throughout his exceptionally long
career as writer, thinker and activist, W.E.B. Du Bois was the most powerful
influence on the ideas of the more
highly educated black Americans —

though among the poorer and less sophisticated, others such as Marcus
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 51

Garvey or Malcolm X may, for briefer times, have had greater impact. For
instance, among the cighty prominent Afro-Americans who formed Harold
Isaacs’s panel for evaluating black American views of Africa in the early
1960s, Du Bois was the most frequently mentioned name. Isaacs’s interview-
ces were by no means all positive in their evaluation of Du Bois’s personality
or
teachings, but none scemed ignorant about or indifferent towards him
(Isaacs 1963: 195 ff).
In the fullest of his at
autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois's
attempts
references to an
painful discovery of being ‘African’ evidently
early and —

and conventionally for the time mean the impress of an American

—

racial
awareness they —

do not involve any particular connection to the continent

itself. Asked, when he was already in his nineties, by Harold Isaacs whether
in his teens he had had any knowledge of Africa, he responded negatively,
in the
sayingthat Massachusetts
even if he had sought for books
his home,
on

he
Africa
would then
Great
have
Barrington, library near not

found any (Isaacs 1963: 206-7). At school, he recalled only being incensed
that images of Africans up other than the stereotypical in
no came
‘ savage’
textbook galleries of racial types: and even at Fisk University, Africa ‘was

somcthing in the background. There was always a lack of interest, a

neglect.
a resentment at being classed as Africans when Negroes felt that they were
Americans.’ Like many others, Du Bois credited anthropologist Franz Boas
with awakening the interest he did eventually develop in Africa, but that was
only after about 1914 (ibid.: 207).
In his important 1915 book The Negro, Du Bois offered probably the least
romance-bound, most factually grounded view of Africa yet published by a
black American writer. In tune with the general thought of his age, he

placed great stress on the physical characteristics of different human types.

Yet he also insisted that there could be no clear scientific definition of race,
and entered an early complaint against the whole idea of a distinct ‘Hamitic’
race
being responsible for Africa’s major cultural achievements (ibid.:
16-17). Quite unlike later theorists of Africa as an
especially beneficent
physical environment for human development —
a favourite view of some

furo-racists who thought that natural abundance explained Africans’ sup-

posed lack of development, and later of romantic Afrocentrists who claim
that it accounts for allegedly superior African moral qualities -

Du Bois

emphasized the harshness of life there. Disease, parasites and poor soils
made sheer physical survival harder in Africa than in any other continent,
he believed (18-19). This view,
oversimple, at best was shared by contem-

poraries like the great Haitian

ethnologist Jean Price-Mars (1928/1983:
58-9, 76-8) and, less understandably, repeated almost verbatim by modern
Afrocentrists like Chancellor Williams (1971/1987: 49-53) .?8
Du Bois accepted then current views that humanity first developed in
Asia, and had entered Africa in the distant past (20-23). On ancient Egypt.
he indigenous African roots for its civilization while also
emphasized
that it ‘drew from Asia
recog-
nizing largely from without’, mainly western (30).
On the race of the Egyptians, he stressed their mixed character -

trying to
52 AFROGENTRISM

quantify the different types there, seeing only a minority as fully ‘Negroid’,
urging that none was white in the modern sense, and comparing Egyptian
physical appearances with ‘the striking and beautiful types arising from the
mingling of Negro with Latin and Germanic types in America’ (33).
Except for the last, obviously subjective and personally important identifica-
tion, none of this would be unacceptable to Egyptologists in the 1990s.
Du Bois then sketched the history of the continent across three millennia,
giving most attention to the states of West Africa. He anticipated much
later writing in arguing that the apparent degencration of West Africa's
kingdoms from the achievements of the past must be due to the advent of
the slave trade, not cause to (67-8). Overall,
any internal his account

avoided sensationalism pleading, being a solid reflection

and special of the
state of knowledge at that time, despite his reliance on such questionable
colonialist sources as Sir Harry Johnston and Florence Shaw, Lady Lugard.
His most obviously parts pris passage related to Liberia, his brief description
of which (69-71) gave no hint of the territory's disorganized and tyrannical
state.

In later writings including the greatly revised

—

and updated reworkings

of The Negro which appeared in 1939 as Black Folk Then and Now, and in 1947
as The World and Africa - Du Bois tended towards a more
polemical tone —

though he also took adequate account of new research history,

on African

including that of ancient Egypt. Some, such as Kwame Appiah (1992), have
seen him as
shading mto a romantic racialism, Provided we
keep in mind
the distinction, important to Apptah’s case, between racialism (belief in the
distinctive characters of different racial groups, a
pervasive mistake but not

one necessarily hostility or to on those

implyingprejudice any group
which does
grounds) and racism (belief in a hierarchy of such groups,
necessarily lead prejudice
to and -
of which Appiah does not accuse

Du the is
hostility
unfair.? he tended
Bois) judgement not Certainly increasingly
towards a romanticized enthusiasm for Africa itself, as his cmotional

response on first visiting the continent in 1924 indicated (excerpted in Van

Deburg, ed. 1997: 47-50), Some commentators have viewed Du Bois’s

choosing to spend his last years living in newly independent Ghana as

evidence of this; though clearly the Communist faith he adopted in old age
also had much to do with the alienation from America which induced his

emigration. And even as he became ever

sharper and more
categorical in
his denunciations of white prejudice, more pessimistic —

if not bitter =

about
the prospects for racial and social justice in America, Du Bois never ceased
to be a scholar as well as a
propagandist. His successive writings on African

history may not have involved original research of the same order as his

justly famous works on the Atlantic slave trade, Reconstruction and black

Philadelphia, but they remain considerably more factually reliable than

many later Afrocentric publications.

In his imaginative writing, Du Bois sometimes reached for symbols of
civilizational, or even
biological, priority of Africans over Europeans. Thus
in his best-known poem, ‘The Song of the Smoke’, he proclaimed:
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 53

The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man!

For blackness was ancient ere whiteness began.
(Du Bois 1985: 8; also in Gates and McKay 1997: 612)”

less affirmation of romantic

Du _ Bois’s final view, however, was an

racialized thinking than a dream of ‘Third World’ solidarity, also evidently

influenced by the Communist beliefs of his last years. Africa took its place

primarily as a means to that end:

The actual heritage between

ties of the individuals of this group vary with
the ancestors they have in common
that and many others, Europeans and
Semites, perhaps Mongolians, certainly American Indians. But the physical
bond is least and the badge of colour relatively unimportant save as a badge;
the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery, the discrimina-
tion and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of
Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this
unity that draws me to Africa. (Du Bois 1940: 117)

More obviously romantic and propagandist, though still generally sober

and serious in their approach, were the writers who continued to produce

‘contributionist’ histories —

narratives emphasizing the African contribution

to world civilization, and the black contribution to American development
-

up until and into the Civil Rights era. Most ambitious in scope was the work
ofJoel Augustus Rogers, whose nearly fifty years of assiduous information-

grubbing culminated in the massive, self-published World’s Great Men of Color

in 1947, Born in Jamaica in about 1880, he moved to the USA in 1906 and,

while scraping a living in a variety of manual occupations and later as a

newspaper columnist, produced a steady stream of popularly orientated
historical works. The majority of these were
self-published and remained in

obscurity, though his most accessible texts, the picture-book Your History

from the Beginning of Time to the Present (1940) and the vivid 100 Amazing Facts
About the Negro (1957), reached a wide audience and went through numer-
ous editions. Himself light-skinned and apparently initially shocked
—

to

discover that in the States, unlike Jamaica, people of his hue were discrimi-
nated against just as sharply as those of more obviously unmixed African
descent (Kellner 1984: 309) he developed a particular interest
-
in the
theme of ‘race mixing’ in history (see, for example, Rogers 1927, 1940-44,
1952). One aspect of this preoccupation led to the least intellectually
convincing part of his labours: his obsession with claiming African descent
for many famous historical figures usually thought of as white. They
included what he called the ‘five Negro Presidents’ of the USA (supposedly,
Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln
and Warren Harding) as well as such oft-invoked names as Beethoven and

Browning.
Such claims represented the more questionable side of Rogers's very
uneven attitude to historical proof: what St Clair Drake describes as his
54 AFROCENTRISM

‘solid scholarship combined with considerable speculation’ and “temperate,

sophisticated approach to the use of sources, which unfortunately was

sometimes strictly
not adhered
(1987: 98-9). Rogers’s procedures
to’ were

certainly, at times, indiscriminate and uncritical. His biographical sketches

of prominent ‘men of color’, though mainly focused on people of African
descent, also included a rather
random-seeming handful of Asian and Arab

figures. His very first subject in World’s Great Men was the ancient physician
Imhotep, who though —

probably (like Noah or

Gilgamesh) based on a

historical individual is known -

mostly as an Egyptian god. He laid claim not

only to numerous major figures of American and European history, but to
the Prophet Muhammad, who was, as he insisted, ‘a very black man’ (1940:
32). And he rarely offered any critical assessment of his subjects: the fact
that they were in some way prominent, and had at least some trace of non-
white ancestry, seemed to be enough. His guiding principle, he said, was

that ‘the recital of the deeds of the or the worthy was instinctive in
great
is of
humanity’ (Rogers 1947/1972 I: 6). The only really negative portrait
Marcus Garvey, whose enthusiastic supporter Rogers had once been.

Garvey'’s doctrine ‘was, in short, racial fascism’, his methods ‘twisted,

archaic, perverse’, his followers ‘rabid’ (ibid. TI: 420, 427, 418). With this
included noted
exception, Rogers's pictures of his subjects (who even some

African slave-traders} served primarily as

unalloyed boosters to race
pride.
Rogers's works have continued to be republished, and praised by more
recent Afrocentrists: though he would probably have had little sympathy
with their separatism. He insisted that race was only ‘a concept that was
thrust upon me (I had never felt otherwise than as a member of the human
race)’ (1947/1972 I: 7). His decision to include ‘great bad men’ in his
books did not mean that he approved of them simply because they were

black: ‘I dislike conquerors, tyrants, and dictators, whatever their color’ (L

23). Nor do even his wilder flights of historical fancy approach the disregard
for logic and evidence of many present-day Afrocentrists. Indeed, to

compare his books, for all their faults, with much of the material published
by Afro-American cultural nationalists in the 1980s and 1990s -
writers who
have higher degrees, well-paid jobs and guaranteed
secure and publishing
outlets, in glaring contrast to Rogers's lifelong struggle to be heard —

indicates that in such circles there has, if anything, often been intellectual

degeneration rather than development.

The lack of interest in —

and sense of embarrassment or disdain towards

~

Africa which Du Bois noted in his youth was clearly widespread among
Afro-Americans, and persisted well into the era of decolonization. Martin
Staniland’s survey of the black US press in the 1950s and 1960s found little
more of African affairs there than in the whitc-owned media, and
coverage
attitudes that were often not dramatically different, with conventional
stereotypes abounding (Staniland 1991; see also Weisbord 1973). Some
Afro-American leaders and intellectuals, going further than shared stcreo-

types, even identified themselves with the idea of an

imperialist ‘civilizing
mission’ in Africa and elsewhere, and associated this with their own hopes
 DIASPORIC IMAGES OF AFRIGA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 55

for progress Americans.

among Theblack notion of ‘racial uplift, in varying
forms, was ground to thinkers
common as diverse as Du Bois, Garvey and
Booker T. Washington. There may even have been a direct association of
ideas between the perceived need to educate and civilize poorer, ‘backward’
black Americans and the supposed European endeavour to do the same in
Africa. The ideas of one who made such connections in the 1900s, the
novelist and journalist Pauline E. Hopkins, have recently and interestingly
been traced (Gaines 1993). Her own contribution to the vindicationist

genre was pamphlet, evidently intended

a 1905 as an educational aid with
its question-and-answer format and deliberately simple language. The level
of historical knowledge displayed was, however, low even by the usual
standards of the genre. Hopkins repeated the old biblical argument that the
‘three races’ of mankind were derived from the three sons of Noah (1905:
6), and peculiarly argued that black skin colour was actually a concentrated
red, as one could see in blackberries and other fruit! Therefore: ‘The real
color of the African is really purple and nothing else’ (ibid.: 8). In the
standard fashion, ancient Ethiopians were held to have ‘excelled all other
nations’ in ‘wisdom and Literature’ (15), though the only evidence pre-
sented for this is, once
again, the Pyramids. From the ancient world the text

then leaps over the centuries to urge and celebrate the modern
‘restoration’
suddenly
of black Afro-Americans show ‘that they
genius: contemporary
are descended from the learned
once
powerful and
Ethiopians’ by produc-
ing men of talent in all fields of endeavour (17).
Perhaps the most important and intriguing exponent of this kind of

thought, however, was Alexander Crummell. His mixture of militant Chris-

tianity, authoritarian elitism, progressivism, Puritanism and racial solidarity,

as brilliantly analysed by his biographer Wilson Moses, finds many echoes
among latter-day Alrocentrists and other cultural nationalists. As Moses
comments, that ideology, bringing together seemingly contradictory ideas
of cultural assimilationism and political or physical separatism, derives not

from slave culture, let alone any identifiably African influence, but from
black Victorian intellectuals adapting to their own ends the racial chauvin-
ism and militant muscular Christianity so ubiquitous in the majority Euro-
American culture of their day (Moses 1989: 9-10). In terms of political

ideologies in the narrower sense, the closest affinities are with organicist
conservatives like Burke, Guizot or Carlyle (ibid.: 287-90). One can sce the
influence of this structure of ideas on Marcus Garvey —

numerous
disciples
of Crummell passed into the Garvey movement —

and later on the Black

Muslims and Louis Farrakhan, extending into the moral authoritarianism,
racial and sexual chauvinism, and organicism of many in the modern
Afrocentric movement.

Notes

1. The near-ubiquity of these emphases among African-American public figures m the

late nineteenth century is
suggested also by their reiteration among numerous delegates
56 AFROCENTRISM

at the 1895 Adanta ‘Congress on Africa’, Delegates E.W.S, Hammond, M.C.B. Mason, and

John Smyth were among those Egyptian heritage: Bowen

declaring a
pride im thei ancient

(ed.) (1896). For the wider context of nmeteenth- and early-twenticth-century Afiican-
American nationalist thought, see also Moses (1978); Redkey (1969); Stuckey (1987).
2. For a succinct summary of the possible origins of such ideas of a curse on Ham and
his descendants, legitimatmg African slavery, see Blackburn (1997: 64-76). There 1s a

substantial prior literature on this question, much of it given a

politically charged
resonance
by dispute over how far, if at all, carly Judaic texts may be ‘blamed’ for helping
to muate a discourse of racial hierarchy: see Evans (1980) Isaac (1985); FE. Sanders
(1969); Hannaford (1996: 90-95).
3. On the career of this remarkable figure, see Schor (1977).
4. Neither here norm his tater collection, Afrca and Enrope (Crummell 1891), however,
did he press the case for historic or
prehistoric African greatness. On the contrary, his
belief in the ‘crvilizing mission’ that Afro-Americans could accomplish im West Africa was
premised on conventional ideas about African backwardness and lack of civilization -

though fe also insisted that West Africa’s natives

possessed some fine moral and
industrious qualities (e.g, [891: 87-8, 194-5), and naturally repudiated ideas that the
supposed backwardness reflected some myarnint racial essence or natural inferiority.
5, [have been unable to locate a
copy of Lewis's book,
6. The latter pair did indeed have one Afmican-descended grandparent each, but such
chums in regard to Beethoven, Browning and Marx (despite the last-named’s family
nickname of ‘the Moor’) are highly speculative.
7.
Voiney, among the first modern Europeans to suggest that the Ancient Egyptians
were
‘Negroes’ and that civilization origmated in Affica, has naturally had ever-renewed
appeal for Afrocentrists. The Black Classic Press has kept bis 179-1 Ruans of Empues in print

throughout the 1990s,

8. Such ideas were virtial commonplaces m Blyden’s ime, voiced also by a
huge range
of European ideologues: it is their recaprulauon in the late twentieth century that is

peculiar,
9. Only after publicauon of this book did Williams gain firs-hand experience of Africa:
for his involvement with the affairs of the continent, which centred on the Congo, see
J.
Franklin (1985, $988); Skmmner (1983).
10. Councill was
clearly a dedicated educationalist, but also a nan whose ambition and
fed him into a subservience to white Southern interests which went much
opportunism
further even than that of his greater rival Booker ‘T. Enthustastically
Washington,
endorsmg denying any aspiration
segregation, to social equality campaigningand even

for the white-supremacist Southern Democrats, as Washington's biographer says, he

‘fulfilled the Alabama white man’s conception of a
Negro leader’ who ‘could condemn
the Yankee radical and proclaun the Southern white man to be the Negro’s best fend’
(Harlan 1972: 169). of his
Ironically, he lost much white support after sump a
railway
company which refused to let him travel first class.
1H. The meditm through which Hegel's, Carlyle’s and Emerson's ideas were ansmit-

ted to Ferris was evidently his Yale mentor George Trumbull Ladd, to whom fulsome
tribute is
paid. A strong sense of intellectual clitism, rather specifically focused on bis own

old universies, resonates through Ferris’s work. He even suggests that Booker T,
Washington, agamst whose philosophy of race leadership he mounts repeated attacks,
would have been a better and wiser man had he studied philosophy at Harvard or Yale
(Ferns 1913: 107)!
12. Ferris clamed that he had originally been quite unimterested m the racial identity
of ancient peoples, until a
reading of Sergi, Volney, and other authorities (1919: 476), His
seemed to be that his involvement with the issue was scholarly, as
opposed to the
point
romantic racralism of previous Afro-American writers on this theme.
13. On the history of this appeal, and of the ‘Ednopranist trope im African-American

religio-political thought, see Drake (1970).

14. Sebastian Clarke (1980: 36-52) sketches the reasons for the Rastafarians’ enthusi-
asm for Ethiopia and their connections to both biblical stories and claims about ancient
 DIASPORICG IMAGES OF AFRICA BEFORE AFROCENTRISM 57

history, from the standpoint of a

sympathizer, though not a believer, Clarke, under the
name Amon Saba Saakana, has subsequently become the most energetic Briush publicist
for Afrocentrism, Chevannes (1995) 1s a more detailed, scholarly and detached account
of the origins of Rastafari.
15. Claims treated with no doubt justified scepticism by historians: see
Hickey and
Wylie (1993: 254~5).
16. have not been able to see Parker's pamphlet, but his fanciful views on the issue

can be confirmed from the briefer compass of his contribution to the Journal of Negro
History (Parker 1917),
17, Intriguingly, exactly the same ttle, Children of the Sun, was used just a few years later
by the London University anthropologist W.]. Perry. Perry, a disciple of the extravagant
theories of ethnologist Grafton Elliot Smith on the Egyptian origins of all buman
civilizauon, sought in his book to trace common traits, and common Egyptian roots, for
the whole range of cultural phenomena across the entire globe (Perry 1923), The current
Afrocentrists’ revival of the language of ‘Sun People’ may owe something, at least
indirectly, to both Parker and Perry. John G. Jackson's Introduction to African Civilizations,
a
major pioneering work of Afrocentnc history, draws heavily on Perry (Jackson 1970: 73,
75-6, 83).
18. Biographical information is from W. Paul Coates’s Introduction to the 1985 reprint
ofWonderfulEthiopians,
19. John Henrik Clarke and Runoko Rashidi, among others, have also sought to enlist
Hansberry as a premature Afrocentrist: sec, for example, Clarke (1992: 11); Rashidi
(1994: 25-6),
Hansberry, though a revered
20. teacher and energetic organizer who sponsored, in
1925, what was probably the first-ever black American scholarly conference on African
history, published little in his lifetime. Parts of his notebooks on Africanhistory, from
which he drew in widely influential lecture series, were
published posthumously under
the editorship of Joseph E. Harris: a volume on
Ethiopran history (Hansberry 1974), and
one on classical authors’ views of Africa which complements the better-known researches
of Frank Snowden on the same theme (Hansberry 1977).
21. As we have noted, however, the romantic luistoriography of past African glorics was
seemingly widely subscribed
far less to among continental African writers than among
African-Americans. Perhaps the most extensive carlier African production m this vein,
leaving aside the work of Diop, was that of the Ghanaian academic J.C. deGraft-Johnson
(1954). A handful of African imaginative writers have taken up such themes, notably the
Ghanatan novelist Ay: Kwet Armah, whose later work includes unanimuist and (see Armah
1995) even Egyptophile currents closely akin to those of US Afrocentrists.
22. Two disciples of Molefi prominent present-day Afrocentric
Asante, the mostthinker,
have proposed strong affinities approach and the earlier example of
between their hero’s
Woodson’s Mis-Education (Mooijman 1995, Garland 1995). Asa Hilliard, too, proclaims
Woodson to be the crucial forefather of Afrocentrism (Hilliard 1994a: 134-5). Similarly —

if with less uncridcal enthusiasm the theologian Cheryl Townsend

—
Gilkes (1995: 27-30)
views Du Bois and Woodson as the founders of Afrocentrsm, and Asante as the current
exemplar, Asante hunself has credited Woodson with establishing many of the principles
on which Afrocentnism m education now
operates (Asante 1991/1997: 289, 294),
23. Very crudely and oversunply, 1 can be said that Du Bois was nearer to the truth
than the European ideologists who proclaimed Africa's mitative-sapping natural abun-
dance (a view which uncannily echoes contemporary claims that state welfare systems
destroy capacity for self-improvement —
claims which, in the USA, often
specifically target
African-Americans). Much of Africa does indeed have comparatively high densities of
disease-bearing insects and agriculturally poor soils, unreliable
parasites, rainfalls, and
other obstacles to the stable development of complex human socicties. To recognize this
is not to endorse the rhetorical structures cither of Chancellor Williams and his ilk, or of
latter-day ecological determinists. It is noteworthy, however, that Du Bors —
like Woodson
in his relatively brief discussions of African history, and unlike many later Afrocentrists -

sought to explain cultural development in environmental rather than racial terins,

58 AFROCENTRISM

24, And Du Bois’s

‘double consciousness’
most famous
in his
pronouncement ofall, the musing on African-American
Souls of Black Folk, explicitly counterposes the ‘Egyptian’ and
the ‘Negro’ as two quite racial groups
separate (Du Bois 1903/1961: 16),
25,Though see the extensive debate and this
criuques on
question in Bell et al. (eds)
(1996), as well as Lott (1992/3),
26. Berghahn (1977) discusses of Africa Du Bois's
images m
imaginative writings, but
greatly overstresses what she calls their
‘rigid Eurocentricity’ (116), largely because she
fails to place them in the context of his nor-fictional
production. Conversely, Moses
(1996), in stressing Da Bors’s ‘Afrocentrism’,
perhaps overstates the similarities between
his thought and that of later US Afrocentrists,
including an allegedly shared poliucal
authoritarianism.
 5

The Birth of Afrocentrism

Meanwhile, with the growth of a substantial body of professional historians

in black America, the appeal of the older romantic chroniclers seemed to

decline. The wild theories of a Robert Lewis, or

J.A. Rogers's pious efforts
to celebrate the memory of any African with any known achievement in any

sphere, became irrelevant or even

embarrassing to a new cohort of far more

skilled researchers in a new and more

open political atmosphere. Any listing
of the major Afro-American historians of the past few decades would include
such names as Mary F. Berry, John W. Blassingame, John Hope Franklin,
Vincent Harding, Darlene Clark Hine, Thomas C. Holt, Nathan Huggins,
David Levering Lewis, Manning Marable, Wilson J. Moses, Benjamin
Quarles, and Sterling Stuckey, Of these, only perhaps Stuckey and Harding
could be identified at any time in their careers with cultural nationalist or

separatist ideas
—
and neither of them has anything much in common with

Afrocentricity. As Meier and Rudwick comment: ‘Most of the publishing

black scholars were never
separatists’ (1986: 229). The other side of the
same coin is that the Afro-American publicists who did hold
separatist or
cultural nationalist views were not, with very few exceptions, productive
scholars. They polemicized, they but did not research. They made speeches,
and latterly grantedmedia interviews, but they did not write.'
Much the same is true of Afro-American scholarship about. Africa itself. It
must be added, however, that relatively few African-American historians
chose to specialize in the history of Africa, not that it was made easy for
them to do so, to say the least, until quite recently. The first American
historian to undertake fieldwork in Africa was black: George W. Brown, in
the 1930s -
but significantly, he did his research, on Liberian economic

history, under the auspices of the London School of Economics rather than

any American institution. prominent African

A historians,
number of

together with a
larger number of European Africanists, took American
from the 1960s onwards, Kenneth Dike at Harvard
university posts including
and Boniface Obichere at UCLA, but they seem to have had little impact on
Afro-American thinking. It may, though, be worth underlining that the
writings of black American scholars specializing in African history rarely par-
took of the emphases, or the prejudices, of Afrocentric cultural nationalism:

59
 60 AFROCENTRISM

if anything, considerably less so even than those of the major African-

American historians of the USA itself. It is perhaps indicative in thisregard
that in very many cases, I] have no idea at all of the racial identity of
American Africanists whose names and work 1 know, whereas equivalent
information effectively has been thrust to my attention for the vast majority
of scholars working on US subjects.
Separatism did raise its head in academic African studies, though not in
so
widespread or successful a form as in scholarship about Afro-America. In
1969 some black members of the US African Studies Association split off to
form a
blacks-only African Heritage Studies Association. As the new Associ-
ation’s title suggested, its members tended to be attracted to a rather pious
or celebratory, rather than a critical, approach to African studies. The story
of the battle is worth a brief retelling, for in a sense it marks the first

emergence from obscurity on to centre stage of Afrocentrism in North

America.
At the end of the 1960s, the African Studies Association, with over 1,500
members plus some three hundred affiliated institutions, was a veritable
academic empire presiding over one of the fastest-growing of all intellectual
fields. It was also a predominantly white organization, reflecting the then
em

cette
still overwhelmingly white composition of American academia and even of
tt
scholarly African Studies: as of 1968, its governing Board apparently had
mat one black member, the
only distinguished Harvard political analyst Martin
Kilson. In this cra of Black Power and Victnam, of dramatic turmoil
throughout America’s university campuses as in society at large, that
situation could not go unchallenged.
In 1968 a ‘Black
was formed Caucus’
within the ASA, led by John Henrik
Clarke College, New York
of Hunter though allegedly many of its members —

did not actually belong to the Association at all. The Caucus raised a series

of demands for sweeping change in the ASA’s mode of government, cthos

and purposes. The campaign culminated in dramatic scenes at the Associa-
tion’s 1969 annual convention in Montreal, when black radicals disrupted
and cffectively closed down the event. The atmosphere was clearly explosive,
verging at least on outbreaks of physical violence. One angry ASA member
wrote of ‘being menaced harassed, insulted and denied
... cither freedom
of specch or a meaningful dialogue’ (B.D, Bargar, Afrecan Studies Newsletter
—
hereafter ASN —

2, nos. 6-7: 16-17). After forcing the closedown of the

official conference sessions, the Black Caucus presented a statement:

African peoples attending the ASA Conference have demanded that the

study of African life be undertaken from a Pan-Africanist perspective. This

perspective defines that ail black people are African peoples and negates the
tribalization of
peoples. African
African peoples will no longer permit ...

our
people to be raped culturally, economically, politically and intellectually
merely to provide European scholars with intellectual status symbols of
African artifacts hanging in their living rooms and irrelevant and injurious
lectures for their classrooms. (ASN 2, 6-7: 1-2)
 THE BIRTH OF AFROCENTRISM 61

The black militants, headed by Clarke and by Professor Chike Onwuachi

of Fisk University, also had more practical demands: for an immediate

change in the ‘ideological framework of the ASA which perpetuates

colonialism and neo-colonialism’; that African studies be made more

‘relevant’; for control over research funds; and for half the members of the
ASA’s Board to be black (ibid.: 2). Simultaneously, they announced the
formation of an all-black African Heritage Studies Association ‘at which all
Black persons attending the conference were welcome’ (ibid.: 1). Amplify-
ing the list of demands, Clarke said the aims were: ‘Reconstruction of
African History and cultural studies along Afrocentric lines while effecting
an intellectual union among black scholars the world over’ (Clarke 19'70:
10). The phrascology here is interesting ~

apparently one of the first times

the term ‘Afrocentric’ -

or, for that matter, ‘cultural studies’ had

—- been
used in this way.
The Black Caucus and the AHSA —
it remained unclear how far these
were
just two names for the same thing, though it was apparent that the
same few individuals dominated both were evidently, by no standards,
—

large bodies. Comparing all the rival statements published in the African
Studies Newsletter and elsewhere, onc finds a maximum of ten names: Clarke,
the subsequently notorious Leonard Jeffries, Onwuachi, Michacl Searles
and Nicholas Onyewu of Federal City College, Washington DC, Shelby Faye
Lewis (Southern University, Baton Rouge), Nell Painter (San Jose College),
Jan Douglass (‘of New York City’), Inez Reid and Herschelle Challenor. Nor
could they be called a distinguished group in academic terms. Apart from
their leader, the prolific but unscholarly John Henrik Clarke, and Nell
Painter, who had worked in Ghana and subsequently emerged as a major
historian and author of important books (on American, not African,
history), I can trace only one of them as having produced any substantial
publication, then or subsequently and even this was only as one of three
—

co-editors of a book.’ It was not at all clear who they spoke for, apart from
themselves as Henry L. Bretton
—

ironically admitted, their claim to be ‘the

authorized spokesman for hundreds of millions of people’ left him ‘limp

with admiration, as a
political scientist?’ (ASN 2, 6-7; 19). Even Clarke
himself seemed to concede that ‘the main aims and objectives of the AHSA
had not been made known to any appreciable number of the attending
black intellectuals’ at Montreal (Clarke 1970: 9). Indeed, one ASA official

alleged that
played Clarke
slippery had
game, pursuing a rather double

private summitry on the one hand and demagogic appeals on the other
(JJames L. Gibbs, ASN 2, 6-7: 13-14). But then these were heady times for
self-appointed revolutionary vanguards. Alongside the ASA Black Caucus
marched the Radical Caucus —

also, by its own admission, all of ten cadres

strong
—

which not only demanded that the Association officially adopt an

anti-imperialist programme but affirmed: ‘we no

longer consider ourselves
a caucus and have renamed our group the Pan-Africanist Radical Baraza’
(Resnick 1970: 14~—15°).
The radicals’ calls for ‘relevance’ were themselves thoroughly double-edged,
62 AFROGENTRISM

as Pierre van Berghe acidly commented.

den A demand that expatriates’
research be to African
relevant governments’ prioritics ‘unwittingly presents
us with a sophisticated blueprint for intellectual neo-colonialism by showing
Western scholars a
way to survive in Africa by serving the needs of the new
ruling class’ (Van den Berghe 1970: 334), For Clarke and his co-thinkers,
such concerns were probably rather beside the point: in a forum supposedly
devoted to Africa, they were interested in American, not African, ‘relevance’.
As one of them, Nell Painter, proclaimed, their protests were launched ‘not

only because the ASA needs readjustment, but also because it is an integral

part of racist America’ (ASN 2, 6-7: 30).

At Montreal, some proposed a compromise formula
senior ASA members

conceding many of including the demand

the black for radicals’ demands,
50 per cent representation on the Board. A postal poll of the membership,
however, indicated that a large majority opposed such a formula (ASN 2, L:
2-3). Dozens of members, including several of the most. prominent US
Africanists and of the ASA’s black members, endorsed an
angry statement

protesting ‘that the ASA has been forced to accept racialist principles and
io divide its membership into racial categories’. The statement alleged that
most Black Caucus members did not even belong to the Association,
condemning the disruption of mectings ‘by physical force’ and the black
radicals’ ‘scorn for orderly democratic principles’ (ASN 2, 6-7: 22). One
ASA member, Ann Beck, must have spoken for many when she insisted: ‘J
the thesis implicit in the statements of the Black
personally cannot accept
Caucus that race determines a scholar’s qualification to analyze and

synthesize the African past’ (ibid.: 17). Another, Arthur Keppel-Jones,

proved that overheated rhetoric was certainly no
monopoly of the radicals
with his view: ‘[ recognize Nazi stormtroopers when I see them, and am no

more
willing to submit to bullying from black ones than from white’ (ibid.:
27).
The idea that the African Heritage Studies Association -

which another
critic, Henry L. Bretton, called an ‘ad hoc coalition formed under unspeci-
fied conditions and circumstances by unidentified persons representing
obscure causes’ (ibid.: 19) —

should be able to nominate half the ASA’‘s

Board members was clearly unacceptable to many, probably most, of those
involved. On the other hand, it seemed unacceptable to the AHSA militants
that anyone except them should choose the Board’s black membership. If
the latter were to be subject to open clection, they allegedly said, ‘the right
Blacks would not be elected’ (Cowan 19'70: 344).
Negotiations between the ASA and AHSA, not surprisingly, soon broke
down, and thereafter two distinct bodies operated though -
the ASA
remained far the larger and indeed, it would appear, retained more black
members than did its Afrocentrist rival. ASA President L. Gray Cowan,
insisting that this
political thanwas a racial
a issue rather (surely, in that
a false antithesis if there one), tried to write fins to
atmosphere, ever was

the affair by asserting, rather unconvincingly: ‘I welcome the presence of

the AHSA and hope that the parallel interests
... of the two groups will
 THE BIRTH OF AFROCENTRISM 63

bring them coming years’ (Cowan 1970: 345), The

closer together in the
real last word, probably belonged rightfully to Martin
if there could be one,

Kilson. Ayear after the initial storms, he resigned from the Board expressing
his ‘disgust’ at what he saw as white members’ timid fumblings over the
affair. Their behaviour was
‘profoundly sycophantic in its guiltridden
relationship to the silly political posturing and bizarre intellectual antics of
black militants’ (ASN 3, 7: 20).
Outside academia, meanwhile, a somewhat different story prevailed.
There existed a
flourishing ‘underworld’ of largely self-taught enthusiasts,
working outside academic institutions and often in manual occupations,
publishing in tiny black-owned imprints and not infrequently publishing
themselves, their work often to be found only in the then few bookshops
and even fewer libraries catering specifically to the African American

community.*
Musicologist John Corbett’s interviews with Alton Abraham, the Chicago
mystic who was for decades a confidant and associate of thegreat bandleader
Sun Ra, provide a window into onc small segment of that world, including
both its wonderful ambitiousness amid straitened circumstances and its
severe intelectual limitations. In the early 1950s, Abraham recalled:

[Wie already doing ancient

were biblical research and research in astrology
and the origin of mankind. Found out that all people came
researching ...

from one source, civilization had its beginning in one

parucular area. Those
that know know that that area is cither the area around the Tigris and
rivers, it’s in certain of Africa that [sic]... T have
Euphrates or parts in area

a
library of over fifteen thousand books dealing on those subjects ... we

wanted to do some
things to prove to the world that black people could do

something worthwhile, that they could create things ... we studied compos-
and read the books of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.
ers like Beethoven, we .

. .

We had studied the prophecies of the pyramids, and the prophecies of

Nostradamus. (Corbett 1994: 218-21)*

It was a world in which, sticcessively, Garveyism and the Black Muslim

movement had substantial imfluence. Here, impulses of racial uplift, reli-
gious and/or mystical leanings, political activism and autodidact scholarship
intermingled in a rich stew of ideas. It was a tradition which stretched back
to nineteenth-century pamphieteers like Augustus T, Bell and John William
Norris. It included writers who have now, posthumously or in old age,
achieved unwonted prominence in the climate of revived cultural national-
ism from the early 1980s onwards, like George G.M. James, Joel Augustus

Rogers and Yosef Ben- -Jochannen. These men’s writings bear all the marks
of an autodidact subculture in which huge but indiscriminate erudition,
antiquarianism, deep suspicion of all ‘established’ intellectual authorities,
and a strong streak of mystical, occult and eschatological beliefs mingled. It
is a milicu which has some
striking similarities to the religio-political
intellectual ‘underworlds’ of English plebeian radicalism delved into by
64 AFROCENTRISM

historians Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson

like sce, for instance, —

Hill’s The World Turned Upsede Down (Hill 1972) and Thompson's Witness

Against the Beast (Thompson 1993) or even those unearthed in Carlo-

Ginzburg’s work on medieval European popular philosophy and witch cults

(Ginzburg 1980, 1983, 1990).
Indeed, there are some direct parallels and connections between these
differcnt worlds of ‘secret’ knowledges, from carly modern Europe, through
John Milton’s or William Blake’s London, to contemporary Chicago or
Harlem. Specifically, there is a fascination with and glorification of ancient
within which, shall Masonic-ritualistic thread has
Egypt —
as we see, a

continued to run. More broadly, there is a shared anti-rationalist. and

counter-Enlightenment world-view. Egypto-nystical writings like Godfrey
Higgins’s Anacalypsis of 1833, long forgotten in most circles, found a

contnuingly fascinated readership among African-American autodidacts,

and were often reissued by Afrocentric publishers.®
In part at least, the coming of Afrocentricity to the academic milieu and
to global media attention represents the ‘coming in from the cold’ of these

previously marginal currents an inclusionary move which owed far more —

to political than to scholarly changes. In the original heyday of cultural

nationalism among Afro-Americans, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s,
its impact on research and the study of history was rather small. In the 1990s
the situation is very different in terms of public profile. Whether it is to be
a new
departure also in terms of substantial work, the establishment of a

firmly grounded new

paradigm, still remams to be seen; but on the evidence
we shall survey in subsequent chapters, it seems unlikely.

Notes

1. For broader overviews of the development of African-American historical scholar

ship, see Hine (1986); Meier and Rudwick (1986); Novick (1988 ch. 14). Itas notable that
none of these, nor
any academic survey of American or Afro-American historiography
which E have read, discusses the ‘alternative’ tradition of largely amateur research which
forms Afrocentiism’'s main intellectual lineage, and is
my main focus here. The only mayor
attempt bring the two currents
to my knowledge, is St Claw Drake’s Black Folk
together, to
Here and There (1987, 1990), which is considered elsewhere in these pages.
2. Jeffries and Reid apparently both hold doctorates in African studies from Columbia

University the former's on-—

the polities of the Ivory Coast, the fatter’s on the Congo
Democratic Republic but neither appears to have published significant scholarly work.
—

Pamter’s mayor work includes her 1977 and 1996 volumes: these and her statements on

historical method (e.g. 1986) indicate a

philosophy of history poles apart from. the
boosterism of the John Henrik Clarke school. Meier and Rudwick (1986: 214), based on

interviews with Panter, discusses her ideological evolution as a historian,

3. Lread Resnick’s statement several times, struggling with my common-sense msunct

that be Unfortunately, ii to have been written with straight

it must surely a
puton. scems a

face.
4. And sometimes not even there: even the Schomburg Library, the world’s premier
research collection on African-American subjects, does not have fully comprehensive
holdings of such matertals.
5. Sun Ra’s biographer traces the stages of the bandleader's own mmmiersion in esoteric
 THE BIRTH OF AFROCENTRISM 65

Egyptology, whichplayed so large a part in his music and thought: they included the
works of Albert Churchward, Gerald Massey, Count Volney, Helena Blavatsky, Pyotr
Ouspensky, George Wells Parker, Godfrey Higgins and George G.M. James (Szwed 1997:
61-73, 106-9).
6. See also G. Hill (1977: esp. 69-79, 299-301); K. Thomas (1971: esp. 318-32); and
above all Yates (1964, 1972). Another direct —
if subterranean —

connection
may be found
in the Swedenborgian tradition. Emmanuel Swedenborg and his followers, like many later
Afrocentrists, believed that Africans were inherently more spiritual in oudook than other

groups, and looked to them for a revival of Christian values: on this, see Fredrickson
(1995: 62-3).
 6

The Masonic Connection

George G.M. James's book Stolen Legacy has achieved posthumous fame as a
founding text of Afrocentrism, and especially of the argument that the
ancient Greeks ‘stole’ all their knowledge from black Egyptians. James’s
book, however, is as much a
mystic-ritualistic, and more specifically Masonic,
work as it is an Afrocentric one. His major sources include Masonic,
Theosophical and Rosicrucian works (these currents sometimes overlap: for
mstance, the Theosophists founded the first and only Masonic lodges to
admit women) lauding the ancient Egyptians as originators of an esoteric
wisdom and ritual which has passed directly to present-day cults and secret
socicties. Among these sources are G.I. Vail’s The Ancient Mysteries and
Modern Masonry, D. Davidson's The Great Pyramid: Its Dwine Message, Annie
Besant’s Esoteric Christeanity, H. Spencer Lewis'sMystical Life ofJesus, and the
Rostcrucian Digest. James’s central plea relates not —

as with most Afro-

American works in related vein -

mainly to the need for racial uplift, but to

his desire for ‘the solution of the problem of universal unrest’ lames 1954/
1992: 151). Although this is hardly a specifically Masonic sentiment, it is

precisely the idea and the wording held forth by the more messianic
advocates of Freemasonry as the aim of their movement, especially in the
writings from the first few decades of this century to which James makes
frequent reference.
George James would thus appear, from internal evidence, to have been a
Mason, and to have been strongly influenced by the more esotcric aspects
of Masonic lore.’ More generally, the sources on which Afrocentric writers
have fastened have included many works by Masonic chroniclers. These
works had their own reasons
(drawing on the Hermeticist and Rosicrucian
tradition, which we now know to have been the crucial formative influence
on Masonry) emphasize both the foundational
to status of ancient Egypt as

source of all knowledge and the persisting -

if hidden -

power of that

knowledge, including strong, direct connections Egypt to northern from

Europe. Such ideas could readily be pressed into service by Afrocentrists for
their own, very different purposes. Vail, Besant and the Rosicructan Digest are
also utilized by Ben-Jochannen, as are S. Clarke and R. Englebach’s Ancient
‘eyptian, Masonry, Levi H. Dowling’s The Aquartan Gospel of Jesus Christ, an

66
 THE MASONIG CONNECTION 67

anonymous but evidently esoteric work entitled The Lost Books of the Bible and
the Forgotten Books of Eden, and so on.”
Martin Bernal notes importance of
the both Rosicrucianism and carly
Freemasonry in influencing the ‘triumph of Egypt’ in eighteenth-century
European thought (Bernal 1987: 173-—7, 180-81). Bernal misses or chooses
not to stress, however, the mystical and mythographic elements in this —

perhaps because he docs not wish to draw attention to the more intellec-

tually disreputable strains in beliefs which accord with his own. Nor does he
note how a Masonic influence has continued, more or less underground,
into twenticth-century Egyptology, including its Afrocentric versions.
As David Stevenson has shown (1988), the real of Freemasonry lay
origins
in seventeenth-century Scotland. Myths of Egyptian origin were, however, a

part of the movement from the start, for it drew a

great deal from earlier
Neo-Platonist and Hermeticist occult ideas. The Hermetic movement, whose

greatest thinker was Giordano Bruno, took

inspiration mystic from a body of

writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a supposed Egyptian sage often

identified with the god Thoth. In reality the works thought to be those of
Hermes dated from the second and third centuries ce, but belief in their
vast Egyptian origins and mystic power was widespread (Yatcs 1964).
age,
Not knowing that the sacred texts actually postdated Jesus, adepts were also

impressed by the seemingly uncanny anticipations of Christian teachings

they contained. Hermetic doctrine, with its nearfanatical high regard for
supposed ancient
and David
Egyptianwisdom, was well known in Britain around 1600,
Stevenson is able to show direct connections between its
strong,
enthusiasts and the probable founders of what we now know as Freemasonry
(Stevenson 1988: 77-96). Thus references to Egypt, and a belief that
Masonic symbolism and ritual had sources in the Egyptian Mysteries, were

central to Freemasonry at the very outset. These ideas scem to have had a

new lease of life in the carly decades of the twentieth

century. They were

given renewed force, no doubt, by a range of contemporary

wide intellectual
currents: the late-Victorian revival of irrationalist and mystic ideas, the
ubiquitous obsession with racial doctrines and myths of origin, and the
flood of new information on
Egypt itself, culminating in the 1922 discovery
of Tutankhamun’s tomb. contemporary Afrocentric
A few writers appear
still to buy the myth of Hermes/Thoth wholesale and without question, as
docs Wayne B. Chandler —

whose credulity extends even to believing that

Hermes lived for three hundred years, using secret regenerative processes
which, Chandler hopes, we
may soon rediscover (Chandler 1994; 218-19).
An is the made by Afrocentrists of writings
especially interesting case use

by Albert Churchward, an
English medical man, ardent Freemason and
in the first few decades of this He is
amateur Egyptologist writing century.
cited as an authority by figures such as Molefi Asante (1990: 96~104), John
G. Jackson (1970, 1972) and Henry Olela (1984), and repeatedly by Yosef

Ben-Jochannen.®
Albert Churchward’s aim was to demonstrate that the ‘secrets’ of Free-

masonry descended directly, in unbroken line, from the wisdom of ancient

68 AFROCENTRISM

Egypt. Egypt was the origin not only of civilization but of a true or natural

religion, of which all later faiths are offshoots and merely partial expressions
(this, too, is a notion which goes back to Giordano Bruno and_ the
Hermeticists). The Egyptians ‘had observed and studied the laws of nature,
and founded a code of laws, as a result, that no other nation has ever

improved upon since’ (Churchward 1920: 114). From Egypt humanity

the rest of Africa but only those who remained in Egypt
spread out across -

evolved on to the higher civilizational and spiritual levels. Elsewhere in

Africa they stagnated: ‘No higher development has ever taken place in this
branch of the human’ (ibid.: 87). The Egyptian masters sent out colonics
all over the world: though Churchward seemed ambivalent over whether
this included the Americas, saying in one place (ibid: 117) that they
probably had not gone there, but in others (160-61; 1921: 287-347)
that they had, since he cites ‘evidence’ including supposed ancient
assuming
Mexican portrayals of ‘Horus of the Double Horizon’.
Not only were all other civilizations and belief systems derivative of the
but the Greeks and Jews debased the Mysteries. The Grecks and
Egyptian,
Romans ‘only practiced a perverted and debased form of the old Egyptian
Wisdom’ (Churchward 1920: 177). As for the Jews: ‘In no land or literature
has the Mythical mode of representation been perverted and reduced to

drivelling foolishness more fatally than in some of the Hebrew legends’

(ibid: 157). Some other cultures, by contrast, revealed surprising virtues:
‘Ircland appears to have retained a truer form of the original than any
other country, possibly because we know that direct communication was

maintained from Egypt to Ireland to comparatively late periods’ (195).

from Churchward’s racist belief standard for his ime that in
Apart
— —

Africa apart Egypt no human

from development observed, his could be
structure of ideas was obviously congenial to African-Americans searching
for historical sources of pride. Africa was the originating point of humanity,
of all knowledge and civilization. Egypt taught the Greeks, Romans, Hebrews
and everyone else all that they knew; indeed, they could only degencrate
from the perfection of Pharaonic forms. All wisdom that was to be found
by Egyptian emissaries. All
anywhere in the world had been carried there
that remained to be added by the Afrocentrists was an insistence that the

Egyptians themselves were black.

But Churchward’s real agenda could not be adopted by the Afrocentrists.
He addressed himself explicitly, if not solely, to fellow Freemasons. The
of his extraordinary mythomania was to convince these ‘Brothers’
purpose
that their society descended from and was the repository of the wisdom of
the ancient More that their historic task to that
Egyptians. was recover
—

wisdom, unite, and combat the world menace of Socialism (which Church-
ward always capitalizes). His desire Egypt and make to clevate the status of
it the
birthplace of all human knowledge was entirely driven by these
specifically Masonic and anti-socialist convictions, as his writings repeatedly
active
emphasize. ‘From the dawn of civilisation to the present moment two

and opposing forces have been engaged in deadly conflict” that is, —
 THE MASONIC CONNECTION 69

Socialism and Freemasonry (Churchward 1920: 216). Primitive humanity

had been socialist, and any attempt to ‘return’ to socialism would be an

unnatural step backwards: “TGAOTU (The Great Architect of the Universe:

the semi-coded Masonic term for a transdenominational Supreme Being)
will not allow such a
retrograde movement: it is against His Periodic Laws
.

any and every nation which attempts it will always be destroyed’ (ibid.:
114). Elsewhere he proclaimed: ‘His will is for the continuance of the
British race -
the highest type of the human development at present and -

[that] the (1914-18) War was ordained for the destruction of Socialism, or

so-called Democracy’ (1921: 478).

Churchward was an extreme but not a
unique case. Numerous Masonic,
Theosophical, Spiritualist and other csoteric writers around that time were

proposing such theories. Mysteries and Modern

Charles H. Vail’s Ancient
Masonry (Vail 1909) was an American version of the same
Egyptocentric
argument, heavily drawn upon by Ben-Jochannen and James. C.W. Leadbea-
ter, a former
Anglican clergyman, then a Theosophist and ‘32nd Degree
Mason’, similarly traced modern Masonic ‘mysteries’ directly from the
Pharaohs —

and could substantiate his claims in a way unavailable to most

others, for much of his knowledge came from mystic visions, from ‘sceing
beyond the visible plain’ (Leadbeater 1926/1986).
There have, of course, been numerous other attempts, of varying degrees
of crankiness, to trace ancient or medieval origins for Freemasonry. Among
the most ingenious and popular recent efforts is John G. Robinson's Born in

Blood (1989), which finds the birth of Masonry in the twelfth-century

Knights Templar. None, though, has been as recurringly popular as the
Egyptian myth. This may most probably have passed into Afrocentric
writings through the network of Prince Hall Masonry, the blacks-only lodges
established in parallel with and unrecognized by the main US Masonic
orders. The latter were and apparently in some —

places still are exclusivist —

and white-supremacist in orientation; strong connections between Southern

Masonry and the Ku Klux Klan have even been alleged. Be that as it may,
middle-class blacks led by War of Independence veteran Prince Hall
founded their own
lodges the first in Boston in
—

1775. What became the

Prince Hall network, named after its founder, began in 1787, also in Boston,
to be followed by a nationwide organization in 1797, eventually with over
200,000 members. It is reasonable to presume that myths of Egyptian origin
for the ‘craft’ had an especially eager audience there, and that the Masonic
circles formed an important conveyor for the storics about Egyptian wisdom
which surface in Afrocentric writing.”
Masonic and other fraternal male orders seem to have been even more

central to the life of black America than especially for members

to white, of
the small black middle class. In Philadelphia in the 1890s, Du
or
aspirers to
Bois reported, there were nineteen black Masonic lodges, plus six ‘chapters’,
five ‘commanderies’, three of the ‘Scottish Rite’ and a drill corps (Du Bois
1899: 224). Although it was not so well organized or wealthy as a rival
fraternity, the Odd Fellows, Freemasonry was evidently an
important part of
70 AFROCENTRISM

the of better-off
life black Philadelphians. Such secret societies, Du Bois
rather obscurely claimed, ‘naturally had great attraction for Negroes’ (ibid.:
222), Nearly fifty years later St Clair Drake and Florace Cayton, in their
classic Chicago study Black Metropolis, saw the Masonic lodges as being, with
the Churches, the ‘traditional
of
bulwarks
the
of organized
traditions’
life the
As so’
middle-class
1890 dozen
—

conservors (1945: 669). early as ‘a or

Masonic lodges existed among black Chicagoans (ibid.: 49); though by the
1940s the authors felt that black Masonry ‘has within the last twenty years
lost most of its influence’ (669).
Among major Afro-American political figures, we know that carly Civil

Rights advocate William Monroe Trotter was a very active member of the
Prince Lodge in Boston; and that
Hall Grand his more famous rival Booker
T. Washington joined the Lodge specifically to combat Trotter's influence
there ~

but had his invitation to deliver the Lodge’s centennial speech

withdrawn after bitter internal dissension
among members (Harlan 1983:
also sought influence in
103-4). The arch-manoeuwvrer Washington, who
the Odd Fellows, was clearly aware of the importance of Freemasonry as a

power base among bourgeois African-Americans.

Such orders,
secret Washington's biographer says, ‘figured largely in
black middle-class life’, where they ‘sustained black group life and racial
solidarity’ (Harlan 1983: 101). It seems a reasonable presumption that Du
Bois and other Niagara Movement luminaries, as well as ‘Trotter, were

members at some time, though Du Bois’s latest and fullest biographer (D.
Lewis 1993) does not mention this. Garveyites, too, sought to take advantage
of Masonic connections to spread of their
the movement: John
message
Bruce, one of Garvey’s most effectiveproselytizers, had exhorted
media
fellow Masons in 1919 that ‘Masonry (was) the medium through which to
give the right direction to the thought and policy which is to govern and
control the race’ (quoted in Stein 1986: 82). We can take it, T think, that

George James and, —

no doubt, other carly Afro-American enthusiasts for

the ‘Egyptian origins of civilization’ -
took many of their ideas from those
circles. The tradition is alive and well: Anthony Browder, representative of
a younger generation of Afrocentrists, devotes himself to uncovering the
‘Nile Valley Presence’ in Europe and the Amcricas, largely through claims
that including the USA's Founding Fathers, passed on ancient
Masons,
Egyptian wisdom through a mass of symbols and structures (Anthony
Browder 1992: 189-217).
A wide variety of African-American nationalist: organizations, cspecially
those expounding new and esoteric religious doctrines, display a Masonic
influence in their beliefs and rituals. This is evident in the Moorish Science

Temple (Gardell 1996: 41-2), and in its more successful indirect successor,

the Nation of Islam, The Black Muslim movement, however, was and is

fiercely critical of Freemasonry, with Malcolm X (whose own father had

apparently been a Mason as well as a Garveyite) denouncing them on

several occasions during his time as a Nation of Islam spokesperson (B,

Perry 1992: 195-6; X and Haley 1965: 252-4). In part, this hostility
 THE MASONIC CONNECTION 71

represented Black Muslim dislike of the generally middle-class and conserv-

ative character of Afro-American Freemasonry. More fimdamentally, how-

ever, it expressed a rivalry over claims possession of ancient
to wisdom, with
Elijah Muhammad’s creation myth of black people originating in Mecca
(and before that the Moon ~
Essien-Udom 1962: 148-9) challenging the
Masons’ Egyptocentric version?
Black Muslim doctrine was modified and softened slightly in Elijah
Muhammad’s last years, then thoroughly under his son and_ successor,

Wallace (Warith Deen) Muhammad. Beliefs in the imminent end of the

white world, in whites as devils, in lunar origins, and so on, were
dropped,
and the movement shifted towards the international mamstream of Sunni
Islam (Gardell 1996: 99-118; Lee 1988: 73-101).° Despite this, the move-

ment’s book service continues to sell and recommend a decidedly odd

range of works, including reprints of numerous esoteric Masonic and

Egyptological books like those of Churchward and Gerald Massey.’ Mcan-

while Islamic—Masonic rivalry has
persisted as indicated, for instance,
—

by
widely distributed works like AJslam, Christianity and Freemasonry (1985) by
the African-American Mustafa El-Amin, a follower of Warith Deen Muham-
mad: largely devoted
a book to ‘exposing’ (in seemingly very knowledgeable

fashion) the allegedly dangerous, conspiratorial, anti-religious nature of

Freemasonry, with special reference to its perils for black Americans, El

Amin’s work also partakes of some classic Afrocentric emphases, in arguing
that Freemasonry, Christianity and Islam all carry legacies of ancient
Epyptian wisdom. Only Islam, however, perpetuates the truth and greatness
of this legacy: Christians and, still more, Masons pervert them (ibid.: 81-93).
On the other hand, E-Amin denounces the earlier Black Muslim claims
that whites are demonic, and those who ‘taught racism, and called it Islam’
(46).
Not all accepted the moderated, de-racialized new mode, however. Louis
Farrakhan left Wallace Muhammad’s movement in 1978, and his breakaway
organization reinstated the old millennial and racially exclusivist beliefs
(Gardell 1996: 119-86; Lee 1988: 103-23). Farrakhan himself featured
more as a
political than as a
religious leader —

rather in the mould of

Malcolm X, even though Farrakhan had called for Malcoln’s death after
his break with the Nation of Islam, and has persistently —

though unprovenly
—

been accused of some involvement in his assassination (an accusation he

has vigorously denied). Louis Farrakhan preach the Black
continues to

Muslim belief that the Freemasons are a demonic white-supremacist con-

spiracy which, using secrets stolen from Islam, masterminds the exploitation
of black peoples worldwide (Gardell 1996: 148-9). Although Farrakhan’s
movement cannot fully be identified with Afrocentrism as such —

indeed,
Afrocentric writers have expressed vehement hostility to Islam —
it
many
shares many of the same general cultural nationalist features, while some

often identified with Afrocentrism, notably anti-white and

specific elements
anti-Jewish prejudice, are found in particularly heightened form among
Farrakhan’s followers. ‘This is a matter we shall explore further below.
 AFROCENTRISM
"2

Notes

1. Should it need saying, my discussion here of such esoterica and its influence on

African-American intellectuals 1s not intended to imply that Freemasons in general

subscribe tu such beliefs. For the vast majority of adherents in all countries, Freemasonry
is evidently a
purely socral and charitable activity,
2. As Mattias Gardell notes (1996; 38-42), Dowling’s Aquanan Gospel was extensively
plagiarized by Noble Drew Ali to
provide the theological underpinnings for his ‘Moorish
Science Temple’.
3. For instance, throughout his 1972 ‘magnum opus‘; 46, 123-6, 172, 211, 250, 252,
324, 364, 419, 424: while all Churchward’s books are listed in the ‘Select Bibliography’:
sce
Ben-Jochannen 1971: 10, 29, 72, 581 and other references,
also and Ben-Jochannen in
Addar-Sebo and Wong (1988: 99). Modern reprints of Churchward's major works are also
produced and sold by various African American organizations.
4. For general histories of Afro-American Freemasonry, see Muraskin (1975); B.
Williams (1980). Lefkowitz (1996a) notes the Masonic influences on Afrocentric views of
ancient history, but she offers an oversimplified and in some respects erroneous view of
the routes they fed into modern
by which writings. Her genealogy runs from Jean
Terrasson’s Sethos, through Vail, to George James, omitting such crucial mediators as

Churchward and Massey, and the whole nmeteenth-century Afro-American tradiuon of

Egyptomania, and failing to take account of standard authorities like Yates.
5. As an aside, I wish to float tentatively a notion on the possible source of the original
Black Muslim myth about the creation of white people. The story propagated by Elijah
Muhammad and his disciples of whites being created
—

by the genetuc engineering of a

‘mad scientist’ on an isolated island has some mtriguing, and strikingly close, sumilaritics
—

to the plot of one of Sax Rohmer’s hugely popular though deeply racist Fu Manchu
— -

novels, The Island of Fu Manchu, published in 1941. One Farrakhan follower, Paul Lawrence
Guthnie, has recently attempted to provide historical substantiauon for Muhammad's story
(Guthrie 1992), but he does so
by way of an astonishing mélange of citation from

speculative Victorian works about ancient myth, and more modern esoteric texts.

Discussion of contemporary lustorical or scientific sources is entirely absent. My thanks to

Michael Francis for bringing Guthrie’s book to my attention.
6. For sympathetic, somewhat uncritical but enlightening surveys of the development
of Islam in the United States, mamly among African-Americans, see Barboza (1994);
Gardell (1996); McCloud (1995), Gardell’s being now the most detailed account,

7. See the mail-order lists published by the African Islamic Mission, Inc., of Brooklyn
(for which Iam indebted to Marek Kohn). Almost all Churchward’s and Massey's books —

other than latter’s

the poetry are reprint from this orgamzation, as are
—
available in
numerous other works of early-twenticth-century romantic Egyptology, but mot the
‘mamstream’ Afrocentric texts of writers like Ben-Jochannen, Asante or Chancellor
Williams.
-

Caribbean Currents

A strikingly high proportion of the glorifiers of the African past who

achieved United States
prominence including Marcus Garvey, J.A. Rogers,
—

George G.M. James, and latterly figures as diverse as Yosef Ben-Jochannen,

Ivan Van Sertima and Louis Farrakhan were of West Indian
—

origin.’ The
Anglophone Caribbean also had its own independent tradition of Afrocen-
tric mythography, which fed powerfully into Rastafarianism and other

‘Ethiopianist?’ movements. The most influential formulator of such ideas in

that context seems to have been a rather mysterious character named L.F.C.
Mantle, who appeared on the Jamaican scene in 1935 claiming to have
served with the British Army in Palestine, to have travelled in Ethiopia and
Tibet, to have earned a Doctorate in Divinity, and to be both a rabbi and a
faith healer in the ‘Divine Science of Jesus the Christ’ (Post 1978: 168). In
fact, it turned out, he had done none of these things, his previous career
having been as an ice-cream vendor and railway brakeman in Cuba.
Discredited, he vanished from view again; but as Ken Post says: ‘Neverthe-
less, despite the personal eclipse of Mande, his “hidden secrets”, reinforced
by the contributions of others, produced a quite formidable body of
doctrine’ (ibid.: 169; see also S, Clarke 1980: 39).
Mantle, like many others, asserted a dual identification: of all black

people as
Ethiopians, Ethiopians, in their turn, with the Jews of the
and of
Bible. The ancient Ethiopians from whom New World blacks were

descended had been the originators of civilization, which then travelled

down the Nile to Egypt, and from there to Greece, Rome and hence to all

European cultures:

Ethiopians were the instructors of Music, founders of Arts, Science and

Philosophy. ... The Ethiopians were the architects that laid the plans and
measured the spaces and laid the foundations of the Pyramids of Egypt ...

and put the finishing touch on the face of the Sphinx.’ (quoted in Post 1978:
170)

Europeans, including the whites who now falsely claimed the title of Jews,
were descended from Adam, as they claimed —

but Adam was created only

73
74 AFROCENTRISM

in 4004 ace, while the Ethiopians had existed 3,400 years before that (ibid:
171), Here Mantle was making really rather ingenious use of archaic
beliefs about the age of the earth which he had
European Creationist
—

presumably imbibed from some fundamentalist Christian sect —

and linking
them to a claim for black cosmological priority. He was also, however, in
effect reviving the ‘polygenist’ ideas of some nineteenth-century European
racial theorists, who had asserted that whites descended from Adam but
blacks came from a different, inferior lincage. Some of these themes were

to be found echoed, forty and fifty years later, in the rhetoric of Yosef Ben-

Jochannen, suggesting that he had directly or indirectly been influenced by

Mantle’s teachings.*
The most lastingly significant of these Caribbean-born publicists, though,
was Marcus Garvey. On the centenary of Garvey'’s birth in 1987, the
authorities in several London boroughs, many American cities and a

number of Caribbean islands organized official celebrations. In Jamaica,

Garvey’s birthplace, he was proclaimed ‘First National Hero’. His remains,
once obscurely interred in Bethnal Green, London, are now
placed in a
Jamaican national memorial. The 1987 Sunsplash the annual -

Kingston
reggac festival took place on a stage over
-

which frowned Garvey’s massive,

idealized portrait. Beneath this icon, it is reported, every performer felt
obliged to compete in homage to the hero. This only capped an already
substantial history of invocations of Garvey’s image in reggac lyrics: allusions
and hymns of praise which often credited him with prophetic or superhu-
man
powers." Throughout the African diaspora, a concept which itself owes
much to his legacy, Garvey'’s posthumous reputation seemed ubiquitous,
The flood of centenary publications ranged from semé-literate pamphlets to
scholarly tomes.
It is hardly surprising that some observers have found this retrospective
lionization virtually incomprehensible. After all, Garvey died in’ poverty,
leaving a
legacy of seemingly comprehensive failure. His Universal Negro
Improvement Association, which had once claimed over six million mem-

bers worldwide, was reduced to tiny and mutually antagonistic fragments.

His business ventures, run with almost staggering incompetence, had all
long since collapsed and had brought him a five-year US prison sentence
for fraud. The Jamaican colonial authoritics, too, had imprisoned and
deported him, while the Liberian government had angrily repudiated his
of setling black American colonists its soil. He had been both
project on

denounced and ridiculed by every other significant Afro-American politician

and intellectual of the age: as a demagogue, a charlatan, a lunatic, a
petty
dictator, a black fascist.
None of these accusations is off
though equally none
wholly is
the mark,
quite fair. Garvey was not mad, illogical and
but he was bombastic,
sometimes incoherent in his public statements. He probably
virtually was

innocent of deliberate, consistent dishonesty in his financial dealings, but

his ineptitude and blindness to subordinates’ failings brought economic
disaster to thousands who trusted him. He was a scurrilous and unscrupulous
 CARIBBEAN CURRENTS 75

polemicist: not merelya demagogue, but a

demagogue none the less by any
definition of the term. He was no more a genuine fascist than he was a

consistent follower of any social theory, but his political practice was wholly
authoritarian and he proclaimed affinities with Mussolini and Hitler ~

even

accusing them
stealing ideas of from his movement.

Despite all this, and despite his record of failure, there was truth in the

centenary claims that Garvey was one of the most influential figures of
the twentieth century. Beyond the frequent confusion of histhought and the
almost comic-opera disasters of his business career, Garvey's sheer energy
and charisma shine through. Even his limitations could be made to work
for him, for they mirrored those of his intended audience. They helped him
win a mass following of the black US urban poor and scattering of
a

adherents across the Caribbean and the Atlantic, which inevitably cluded
the more rationalistic, universalist appeals of better-educated, clearer-

thinking leaders like Du Bois.

The major biographical studies on
Garvey have been the work of
admirers, and have tended to focus on the nature of Marcus Garvey’s own

personality, leadership and ideas, effectively reproducing the elitism and

personalized nature of the movement itself (e.g. R. Lewis 1987; Martin
1976).4 Few have attempted to look at the social character of Garveyism, the
kinds of people who supported him and why. It seems, however, that despite
the large number of poor and working-class blacks who joined the organiz-
ation, Garveyisin remaincd a movement of the middle class in terms of

leadership and ideology. It was

increasingly, as Garvey’s projects ran into

insuperable difficulties and fierce criticism from other black leaders, a

movement of the small black bourgeoisic’s more marginal or

aspirant rather
than securely prosperous members; but it never embraced a
socially radical
agenda, never allowed poorer working men and women into positions of
leadership, and even the populist appeals which Garvey did make to the

poor were
highlighted only after his initial hopes of mobilizing the Afro-
American clite had been rebulfed (Stein 1986: passim). In this at least, later
Afrocentrists and cultural nationalists were indeed to prove truc followers
of Garveyism.
In his view of black and Afmean history, Garvey drew on the various ideas
earlier expressed by the wide range of romantic Afro-American, West Indian
and African historical writers we have surveyed —

there are clear echoes of

people like Blyden, Crummell, Hayne and Scholes in his rhetoric -

and
distilled them into a mythologizing but hugely influential synthesis. A
number of amateur historians and popularizers of inspirational beliefs
about the black past were associated with the Garvey movement and

published in the UNIA paper, the Negro World, including J.A. Rogers, john
Edward Bruce, William H. Ferris and E. Ethelred Brown. And Garvey’s own

speeches writings and peppered were with historical references. African

history, for Garvey, should be a source of inspiration and emotional uplift

to blacks, coupled with a systematic derogation of European claims about
the past. Whites, proclaimed Garvey:
76 AFROCENTRISM

the flesh of their own dead and the raw meat of

made human sacrifices, ate
of doing; their cannibalism
the wild beast for centuries even as they accuse us

than when we were embracing the arts and

was more prolonged ours;

Nile their ancestors were still drinking human

sciences on the banks of the
of the skulls of their conquered dead; when our
blood and eating out
of they were still running
civilization had reached the noonday progress
and with rats, bats and other insects and
naked and sleeping in holes caves

fathomed the of the stars and reduced

animals. After we had already mystery
the heavenly constellations to minute and regular calculus they were
still
blatant darkness.
backwoodsmen, living in ignorance and
WHY BE DISCOURAGED?
The world today is indebted to us for the benefits of civilization. They stole
Then should be ashamed of
our arts and sciences from Africa. why we

but of grander civiliza-

ourselves? Their modern rmprovements are duplicates a

of years ago, without the advantage of what

tion that we reflected thousands
be resurrected and reintroduced by the
is buried and still hidden, to

Fundamentalism’ [1925] in J.H.

intelligence of our generation. (‘African
Clarke 1974: 157; original emphasis. )

then, the of the race;

—

its most
The history of the race, was property
stolen whites and must be reclaimed:
valuable property, which had been by

have tried to rob the black man of his proud

White historians and writers
is discovered to support the race's
in history, and when anything new
past
of in other then it is
claim and attest the truthfulness our greatness ages,

skillfidly rearranged and credited to some other unknown race or

people.
children that direct descendants of the greatest
Negroes, teach your they are

the earth; and it 1s because of the fear

and proudest race who ever peopled
of our return to power ...
why [sve] we are hated and kept down by a
jealous
and world. (Garvey 1925/1986: I: 82)
prejudiced contemporary

like of the earlicr advocates of past African

As this implies, Garvey many
—

well a race-deterministic theory of

greatness
—

proposed a cyclical as as

Africa had led the world, had lost its primacy

history, in which once

and lies, Garvey insisted) but would now

(through white depredations
the efforts of Garvey and the UNIA themselves. It was clearly
regain it by
—

would lead the African renaissance, not

the blacks of the New World who
those of the African continent, for Garvey held conventionally disparaging
of ‘civilization’ Africans, which contrasted
views about the state among
dramatically with his romanticization of the continent’s past. His ideas for
in Liberia like those of Crummell and others, very
UNIA colonization were,

much an Afro-American version of the ‘white man’s burden’ ideology: the

advanced and intelligent Afro-American colonists would guide and civilize
the backward natives.
into
Little in Garvey’s view history, then, was original: he merely put
of
accessible form the by
popularly
—

even more polemical

-
and vastly more
 CARIBBEAN GURRENTS 77

then conventional themes of several generations of Afro-American chron-

iclers. But whereas they had been mostly figures of the utmost obscurity,
Garvey's message had a worldwide influence. The characteristic rhetoric of
Afrocentric ideas about the past, even today, owes more to Garvey than to

anyone else,
In recent Garvey’s admirers
years have claimed to find his influence

absolutely everywhere in black politics and thought. Tony Sewell describes

a
peculiar assortment of leaders from Du Bois, through C.L.R. James,
—

George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah, to Louis Farrakhan as Garveyites —

(Sewell 1990: 53-76). Liz Mackey asserts equally indiscriminately:

Whether black Americans marched on

Washington with King, or
prayed to

Allah with Malcolm X, or armed themselves with the Black Panthers, or

simply came to see that ‘black is beautiful’, they all embodied the legacy of

Garveyism. (1987: 65)

The most bizarre appropriation, however, came from Marcus Garvey’s own

eldest son, a schoolmaster in Jamaica, who suggested in an

essay published
in 1974 that his father’s black nationalism be updated into an ‘African
National Socialism’. ‘It seems certain’, Marcus Jr claimed, ‘that the world
will one day be faced with the Black cry for an African “Anschluss” and the
resolute demand for African “Lebensraum”’ (J.H. Clarke 1974: 387), This
dreadful, uncomprehending mimicry of the century's greatest barbarism is
as untrue Garvey’s real legacy as is Rupert Lewis's Marxized
to Marcus, and
far more disreputable. Indced every attempt to reconstruct a coherent
theoretical Garveyism founders as
surely as did the aged vessels of his Black
Star Line, wrecked on the sheer inconsistency of the man. Almost every-
thing about his career and thought is irrelevant or actively damaging to
modern antiracism and anticolonialism —

except his very simple core

message. That message was of self-respect, self-confidence, selfassertion
for the Americas’ poorest citizens; faith that the future could be theirs if

they made it so. For that one basic claim and its impact, his influence can

hardly be overstated. This, in addition to his

emphasis on Africa as
spiritual
home and source of values, has been the basis for his influence on

subsequent Afrocentric ideas. The unfortunate thing is that much of his

irrationality, his authoritarianism and his mass of prejudices have also been
passed on.

The most ubiquitously cited intellectual inspiration for African-American

militants, from the 1960s onwards, has been a very different kind of
Caribbean thinker from the racial romantic Garvey; the Martiniquan
psychologist and political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925-61). More recently,
ideas drawn selectively from his writings have become a
major direct or
indirect influence on Afrocentric and cultural nationalist. thought; though
as we shall soon see, his thinkingreality poles apart
was in from theirs.
At the time of the 1960s US ghetto uprisings, Liberator magazine editor
Dan Watts claimed that ‘every brother on a
rooftop (with a
gun, that is) can
78 AFROGENTRISM

Fanon’ in Van Deburg 1992: 61). Among the founders of the

quote (quoted
Black Panthers, The Wretched of the arth was
given almost literally holy status.

Bobby Seale said he had read it six times even before forming the party
(Seale 1970: 41), and thereafter he and Huey Newton would pore over it

obsessively, especially for its criticisms of cultural nationalists (ibid.: 51).

Eldridge Cleaver called it the Bible of the black revolutionary movement

(Cleaver 1971: 43, 44-6). For Stokely Carmichael, Fanon was ‘one of my
patron saints’ (Carmichael prison writer and
1968: 150). The celebrated
militant George Jackson repeatedly cited Fanon, usually in conjunction with
Marx, Lenin and Mao, among his personal gurus (Jackson 1971, 1972:
passim).
Even David Hilliard seemingly less interested in theory than any other
—

top Panther leader, and under whom the party became deeply mired in
drug abuse, financial corruption and sexual exploitation claimed a deep —

study of Fanon. His account is important for the apparent painful honesty
with which it tracks a
poorly educated street militant’s encounter with

‘revolutionary’ theory. Initially, Hilliard the school dropout, not surpris-

ingly, found Wretched ofthe Earth iacomprehensible:

I'm lost. I have the dictionary in one hand, the book in the other, and I can’t

the first can’t get past the first

paragraph, barely the first
get past page,
sentence. I might as well be reading in a
foreign language. Practically every
word is unknown to me. (Hilliard and Cole 1993: 120)

Later, though, under tracking the subtleties

Seale’s of
tuition: ‘I listen,
Fanon’'s thoughts, not complicated, this stuff, I now. Is
uncomprehending
what is saying, but
think not ~—

simply Fanon being a revolutionary.

Revolution is a science’ (ibid.: 152). And later still, in prison, Hilliard
the semi-religious initial impact of Fanonist ideas
poignantly reconnects
with the way the Panthers, in their turn, had become icons:

One of the inmates sends me a

dog-eared page from a
copy of Wretched of the
Earth that Huey had left behind. ... The words are no
longer foreign to me,

Earlier this fall I have actually visited Algeria... met some of the revolution-
who knew Fanon, stomach clenches with its familiar ache.
ary leaders My
first here; we've become of
We've come a long way since Hucy was a
part
history. (ibid: 267)

Maulana Karenga, the most prominent among the 1960s cultural nation-
alists against whom American Fanonists like the Panthers
raged, by the had,
1980s, given Fanon a prominent place in his pantheon (Addai-Sebo and
Wong 1988: 177-8). Less militant —
or at least more strategically minded —

black leaders James like Innis and Forman also lauded the Martini-
Roy
By the end of 1970 Wretched of the Earth had allegedly sold
quan’s message.
an astonishing 750,000 copies in the USA (Van Deburg 1992: 60-61). Black
intellectuals as diverse as Henry Louis Gates and Cedric Robinson still
 CARIBBEAN CURRENTS 79

thought Fanon’s legacy well worth fighting fierccly over in the 1990s (Gates
1991; Robinson 1993). Molefi Asante, the leading Afrocentric thinker,
insists on the centrality of Fanon’s ideas to his intellectual formation (Asante
1993a: 138). The current of Fanonism is more diffuse, certainly less activist,
and more academic than it was in the 1960s, but it still flows in a remarkable

range of different Afro-American milieux.

However, Fanon’s ideas were radically different from those advocated,
and sometimes foisted on to him, by successive generations of African-
American cultural nationalists. Often, indeed, the ‘Fanonism’ they have

proposed has been little more than a

dogmatic caricature of Fanon’s own

ideas. Secing the position of Afro-Americans as a colontal one, and

emphasizing the supposed transformative power of spontancous revolution-

ary violence, this caricature has also perceived the colonial situation itself

purely in terms of violence: a distortion actually much more

pronounced in
Fanon’s philosophical mentor Jean-Paul Sartre than in his own work.
Fanon’s discussion of decolonization is far more subtle than that, proposing
a
quite complex explanation which has been ignored equally by his admirers

among 1960s revolutionaries and among 1980s—90s cultural theorists.®

Fanon’s importance lics primarily in two very different books: Black Skin,
White Masks, a study of the of racism psychological effects and colonialism,
written in his twenties; and The Wretched of the arth, a more directly political
analysis of decolonization and its aftermaths. Two further books, Toward the
African Revolution and A Dyng Colonialism, are collections of articles, mostly
about Algeria.
Broadly, we can speak of two different ‘Fanonisms' having operated since
the man's premature death. The first to emerge took its cue primarily from
his last book, The Wretched ofthe Earth, the second, more recent, (mis)reading
has relied mainly on the earlicr Black Skin, White Masks. The second
Fanonism, which has been taken up by literary theorists like Homi Bhabha,
is beyond the scope of our
present discussion, as is the 1990s creation of a

‘Fanon industry’ (sec, amid a rapidly proliferating literature, L. Gordon et

al. [eds] 1996; Read Led.] 1996). The first (in his own life the last) Fanon,
though, is seen above all as a critic of bourgeois anticolonial nationalism,
and as a theorist of revolutionary liberationism. This he certainly was. In
‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, which occupies the later pages of
Wretched of the Earth, he attacked African nationalism as the ideology, or tool,
of the native middle class, a class essentially parasitic in nature and unable
to do more than act as go-between from the metropolitan bourgeoisie to
the African masses. In its search for political power this small group posed
falsely as an
agent of radical transformation. It was obviously tempting, and
became rather popular, for Afro-American militants not only to identify
their position with the colonial situation described by Fanon (here North
American ‘Fanonism’ connected with theories of internal colonialism, as we

shall soon discover) but also to see the African-American middie class and
the Civil
Rights leadership reflected in the mirror of Fanen’s African

bourgeoisie.
80 AFROCENTRISM

For all this, aspects of Fanon’s ideas could readily be appropriated by

cultural as
opposed to revolutionary nationalism, and even
by the Afrocent-
ists whose world-views, one may be sure, he would have scorned. He cannot

be thought of as a
thoroughgoing democratic theorist. He seems to have
been profoundly single-party systems: lamenting the abuses
ambivalent about
of power which were already solidifying in his lifetime, he none the less
never wrote of one-partyism as
objectionable in principle. Being ‘on the
side of the people’ especially the peasantry —
is for him a supreme value; —

but democracy as such does not appear to be. Notions of national culture
are dealt with in ways ranging from apparently uncritical invocation to deep

scepticism of their possible appropriation by reactionary national leaders:

though possibly this reflects not so much indeterminacy on Fanon’s part as

a shift, interrupted by premature death, towards more critical views. He

frequently blurs notions of racial identity and oppression with the idea of
colonialism; but here, too, it may be that this near-identification, which was

the source of much of his appeal both to 1960s Afro-American militants and
to recent cultural critics, was being increasingly jettisoned in his last writings.
Certainly he was less and less prone to see identities between African,
French and American ‘racial’ situations.
In any case, Fanon had never believed that racism in itself conferred

identity: even if, in the

polemical passages most of he of Wretched the Earth,
wrote as thought colonialism
if he did so. His criticisms of négritude were

early and sharp. In 1955 he was already scorning the tendency of West
Indian intellectuals, reacting against their carlier desired assimilation to

European norms, to identify themselves with imagined African

characteristics:

He discovered himself to be the transported son of slaves; he felt the

vibration of Africa in the very depth of his body and aspired only to one

thing: to plunge into the great ‘black hole’. It thus scems that the West
Indian, after the great white crror, is now
living in the great black mirage.
(Fanon 1964/1970: 37)

Fanon had little apparent interest in the classic négritude-Afrocentrist themes

of rediscovery of historic African glories. He had, of course, encountered
but he
the early writings
them
of Cheikh Anta
of
Diop in
rather
Présence
lukewarm
Africae circles;
of ‘interest’
referred to expression
only by way a

and only in the context notably oblique to Diop’s main concerns ~ ~

of

comparing literary production in African languages favourably to that in

Caribbean dialects (Fanon 1952/1970: 21). Netions of a common ‘racial’
culture, and the general ‘racialization of thought’ (Fanon 1961/1967: 171),
which he discerned among African and diasporic mtellectuals as -

among
their Arab counterparts
-—

were in his view likely ‘to lead them up a blind

alley’ (ibid.: 172). Awareness of difference would, and should, grow instead;
realization that “The Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or

the Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites’
 CARIBBEAN CURRENTS sl

(ibid.: 173-4). But —

crucially limiting ‘but’

and it is a his alternative —
to

the racialization of thought he increasingly disliked was to a notion

propose
of national culture homogeneous which is eventu-
internally
—

apparently
—

ally no less restricting: ‘every culture is first and foremost national’, he

insisted (ibid.: 174). He spoke at one point of the need for a ‘National
consciousness, which is not nationalism’ as the only route to mfemational-
ism. To try to ‘skip the national period’ on the route to wider solidarities,
pretending that national identity was outmoded, was not only a ‘mistake’
but the prating of ‘pharisces’ (ibid: 198-9). As with so many others who
have produced similar formulations before and since. Fanon failed utterly
either to specify how ‘national consciousness’ differed from nationalism, or

what the routes might be from that consciousness to cosmopolitanism. Nor

was he wholly immune from romantic cultural nationalist tendencies to

idealize certain expressions and political mobilizations of ‘tradition’. Per-

haps most famously, his essay on women’s participation in the Algerian

revolution (‘Algeria Unveiled’, in Fanon 1959/1965), for all its complexity
and all its genuine commitment to a notion of women’s liberation, is finally

trapped in what was to prove a

hopelessly romanticized and overoptimistic
assessment of the female role in a revolutionary and then an independent
Algeria; and particularly of the significance of the ‘return to the veil’ within
this. Women’s emancipation is finally but comprehensively subjugated to
the imperatives of anticolonialism. Miche! Foucault was later to fall into

exactly the same trap in relation to the Iranian revolution, and to reimposed

veiling there (see Eribon 1992: 281-91, esp. 286).

It must be emphasized, though, how strongly Fanon’s basic beliefs were

universalist. He explicitly rejected identitarian claims, both political and

epistemological: ‘I sincercly believe that a subjective experience can be
understood by others: and it would give me no pleasure to announce that
the black problem is my problem and mine alone’ (1952/1970: 61). He

clearly had no sympathy with the relentlessly racialized identity politics

which has been the trademark of Afrocentrism.
As a kind of pendant to Fanon’s influence, one should note the later,
lesser —
but similar and often intertwined —

impact of another radical black

scholar, who shared many of Fanon’s ideas and, like him, died
tragically
young: Walter Rodney. Rodney, born in Guyana and teaching during his
short career in Jamaica and Tanzania as well as his native country, produced
important writings on precolonial West African history, and on the Guy-
anese working classes. These scholarly works, however, were not the main
source
Rodney's international
of influence. That came from a far more

polemical, wide-ranging book he i in 1972, How Europe Underdevel-

published
oped Africa. The book's argument is well summarized by its tie. It applied
to Africa ideas first presented a litle earlier by Latin American scholars in

relation to their own continent. Some countries were

poor, simply and

directly, because others were rich: the former had been systematically
‘underdeveloped’ by the actions of the latter, Rodney alleged that African

poverty, lack of industrialization, and so forth were the result of centuries

82 AFROCENTRISM

of exploitation by Europe, especially through the Atlantic slave trade and

then colonial rule itself. Africa’s potentialities for indigenous economic

growth had been blocked, turned back, stifled.

Or rather, it was European capitalism which had thus robbed and
mutilated Africa, for Rodney's framework was
strongly Marxist
a one.

Africa’s miserable fate was the consequence of an

unfolding world capitalist
system first of trade, then
production, of Europe and later North in which
America occupied advantageous and exploitative ‘core’ positions, Africa a
disempowered ‘peripheral’ one. Here, though, a crucial ambiguity
Rodney’s message, and even more in the way it was received, became
evident. Was his critique essentially directed against a world system in which
capitalists exploited peasants and workers the former
disproportionatcly
—

but certainly not exclusively white, the latter mainly but not all black, since
there were major African partners in and beneficiaries of both the slave
trade and colonialism, as well as, of course, deprived and dispossessed
Europeans? Or was he attacking a system by which white European people
cheated and exploited black African people? His historical method sug-
gested the first; many of his more rhetorical passages, and his title, pointed
more towards the second. The tension is unresolved in Rodney’s book,

though on the whole one might say that the socialist clement predominates
over the black nationalist one, especially when his other writings and
political activitics are taken into account. The more important point in the
present context, however, is that the book seems to have been received and
its message popularized far more in the second sense. With one side of his

argument, the Marxist one, marginalized or

ignored and the other, the
nationalist one, amplified and simplified, Walter Rodney's ideas could

readily be pressed into service for the Afrocentric cause.®

One aspect of Rodney's ideas which very conspicuously and unfortunately
was nol taken up in the United States was his attempt ~

tentative and,
perhaps, again internally inconsistent but
importance politically of great
—

to redefine then current slogans of ‘Black Power’ so that they were not

exclusive to those of African descent. With his native Caribbean mostly in

mind, he recognized that in several West Indian socictics people of Indian
descent were often poorer, and definitely less well represented in the
political arena, than those of mainly African ancestry. Rodney therefore
tried, in writing and in the left-wing opposition party he founded in Guyana,
to produce a political unity of the underprivileged from both main

population groups, urging the idca of ‘blackness’ as a label for shared

experience of dispossession rather than for ancestry or ethnic exclusivity.’

Such an
attempt, fragile enough in the Caribbean, could not readily be
transposed to other circumstances ~
as the short, troubled fife of the notion
of ‘black’ as common
political identity for all non-white groups in Britain

though Steve Biko’s version of Black Consciousness philosophy in

suggests
—

South Africa shared many of its features, In the United States, however, it
looks to the outsider as
though even the attempt was never seriously made.
As varieties of cultural nationalism became ever more ascendant in Afro-
 GARIBBEAN CURRENTS 83

America through the 1980s and 1990s, ‘blackness’ as an exclusivist. and

essentialized signifier for those of African descent alone could only be
reinforced. One of the casualties was the emphasis on economic deprivation
and shared interests in wealth redistribution, which Rodney had
championed.
Haiti was the second European colony after the United States to attain

independence. It was the first state of predominantly non-European popu-

lation to do so; and for many decades the only black-ruled postcolonial
polity. For an even
longer period, it served massive and multifarious
symbolic functions: above all in the huge archive of North American and

European writings displaying Haiti as evidence that people of African

descent could -
or (more usually, in this writing) could not —

govern
themselves and attain ‘civilized’ status. From about the same time, an almost

equally large body of writing by both Haitian and non-Haitian black

intellectuals represented it as incubator or
exemplar of the future of the
African-descended peoples. Indeed, almost every variety of Third-Worldist
nationalist thought found carly often its carlicst expression in or in — -

relation to Haiti. Central tropes of what were to be called négritude and

Afrocentricity, in particular, found their first formulations among Haitian

intellectuals from the 1920s onwards.
Under the impact of invasion and occupation by US Marines alter 1915,
numerous Haitian intellectuals undertook a revaluation of national identity:
German writers had done in their of French
~—and, rather as cra Napoleonic
dominance, they began a reaching out to the peasant masses, their cultural
beliefs and practices. This newfound nationalist enthusiasm for the peas-
antry was also stimulated by the emergence of widespread peasant. revolts
against the occupicrs in 1918-20. The first pioneer in the consequent
positive revaluation of rural Haiti and its African
heritage was ethnologist
Justin Dorsainvil, who drew on then European psychological and
current

evolutionary theories to present a

picture of the Haitian people as still
essentially African in character (Nicholls 1979: 152-4). The crucially
formative work, however, was
Jean Price-Mars’s Ams: Parla COncle in 1928.
Price-Mars's career strikingly similar
was in to that
many of his ways
contemporary W.E.B. Du of a polymathic scholar-activist.
Bois: that massively
learned in the European social sciences of his day, yet persisting throughout
life (Price-Mars died in 1969 at ninety-two; Du Bois in 1963 at ninety-
a
long
five) in affirming the dignity and significance of Africa’s heritage. Price-
Mars’s book (translated as Price-Mars 1983) and associated writings affirmed
both the basic cultural unity of black Africa and the strength of its persisting
cultural influence in Haiti. There was in his celebration of peasant life

certainly a strain of the ‘conservative populism’ which Nicholls finds

characteristic of his thought, and which he links, perhaps somewhat unfairly,
not only early-nineteenth-century
to Romanticism German but to volkisch
Nazi ideologues (Nicholls 1979: 157)." Undoubtedly, too, Price-Mars held a

romantic view of rural Flaiti as well as of Africa, and was

peculiarly muted
about its dreadful material poverty. Very probably some of the same
charges
84 AFROCENTRISM

of adhering to a damaging racial mystique, transposed ail too readily from

contemporary European theories, can be levelled at him as at Du Bois.

Yet just as we find litte sanction in the life and work of Du Bois for later
irrationalist appropriations of the Pan-African idea, so in Price-Mars we

already encounter a powerful critique of the counter-racisms of ‘writing

back’. He was fundamentally a rationalist, a believer in cultural syncretism
rather than in myths of purity, onc who looked to an innovative future
rather than a consolingly noble past. Even in lauding African civilizational
achievements, he wrote of Haiti as ‘the new social form which is slowly
emerging from the confusion of mores, beliefs, and customs’ (1983: 217).
The influence of Price-Mars and other rediscoverers of peasant tradition
was soon felt in literary circles. The 1920s saw a dramatic stylistic and
thematic shift, adumbrated by the ‘Indigenist’? movement. This involved an

increasingly pervasive invocation of African and voodoo-related themes.

Initially, as in the work of Jacques Roumain and Carl Brouard, the romantic
celebration of African ‘primitivity’ was in the service of beliefs about Haitian
culture as a
unique Afro-Latin synthesis. Its political thrust was above all

opposition occupiers,
to the American previous and it maintained the
racism
gencration’s emphatic rejection of biologistic authori-
even
though an —

tarian streak, widespread Nietzscheanism, and occasionally (as in Roumain

and Max Hudicourt) an enthusiasm for Mussolini, may be discerned in
some of these writers (see Nicholls 1979: 158-64; Dash 1981]: 65-97).
Thus, while there were some
disturbing political undercurrents in the
literature of the 1920s, its general tenor was fairly straightforwardly nation-
alist, and anti-racist. Only in the 1930s did a
full-fledged culturalist irrational-
ism and even counter-racism emerge, with the successor ‘Griot’ movement.

This was eventually to have some alarming political offshoots, most evident
in the career of a minor ‘noiriste’ poet, influential ethnological propounder
of peasant cultural ‘authenticity’, and later one of the Western world’s most

brutal and erratic dictators. The phases of Francois

different Duvalier's
progress had far more than just biographical connections. In his earlier

literary, ethnographic and historical work can be discerned the elaboration

of a set of myths designed to legitimate the reign of terror he was later to

install in Haiti.
Four clements predominated in the mix of ideas put forward by Duvalicr
and his collaborators (most important of whom was Lorimer Denis) in the
1930s and 1940s.° disconcerting similarities
They all have to central themes
in the contemporary US Afrocentrist-postcolonialist-nativist, mélange. First
there was an
aggressive anti-rationalism, and a
culogization of peasant
belief, tradition and legend. This served to delegitimize reasoned criticism
of his dictatorship, especially that mounted by socialists, Marxists and, of
course, foreigners. It also underpinned Duvalier’s deft manipulation of
superstitious popular fears, through his cultivation of powerful local houn-

gans (voodoo priests), his use of psychic as well as physical terror by the
paramilitary Tonions Macoutes, and his attribution of supernatural powers to

himself.
 CARIBBEAN GURRENTS 85

Second was the exposition entirely fabricated

of an view of the
almost
national past. This accorded primacy to the intra-elite
absolute historical
division between ‘blacks’ and ‘mulattoes’, wholly misrepresented this by
presenting black powerholders, past and present, as
representatives of the
masses, assimilated class to colour, and bestowed spurious populist creden-
tials on ‘black’ autocracy.
Third was an essentialist and organicist notion of racial character, into
which ideas of culture, community and nationality were also rolled. This not

only facilitated use of a nationalistic and, on occasion, Pan-Africanist or

Third-Worldist discourse by the dictator, and further

delegitimized all
crilicism as ‘anti-national’, but served more or less effectively to disguise the
Duvalier regime's own abject dependence on US aid and approval.
Fourth was explicit and fierce rejection of liberal and democratic ideas,
argued both to be undesirable in themselves and, under Haitian and other
‘Third World’ circumstances, to be the creatures of imperialist foreign
enemies and their local apologists.
Thus we can sce that some
prefigurative and —

directly or indirectly —

globally influential discourses of cultural authenticity —

of what was to be
called négritude, later Afrocentricity
first had their origins in a very direct —

thrust for political power. Power, moreover, which was to be wielded by the
successful self-proclaimed apostle of cultural decolonization Francois —

Duvalier in the most

-

repressive, corrupt and vicious manner. These

Haitian origins of the nativist and irrationalist ideology which has in recent
years attaincd so
powerfully renewed a
global vigour have more than just
Antillean significance. And it became evident in Haiti, as it was Tater to do
elsewhere, how apt the discourses of cultural nationalism and racial asser-

tion were for the legitimation of dictatorship. It is disturbing to find, in the

1980s and 1990s, a whole new wave of writing about race and identity which

poses as solutions things which in Haiti, the first black postcolonial polity,
have long since proved to be major parts of the problem.

Notes

L. For a
general sketch of Caribbean mtcHectual influences on African-Americans m

the USA, see V. Franklin (1992b),

2. The influence certainly need not have been direct, since similar beliefs have been

widespread among the more esoteric kinds of African-American religio-political group-

ings, including the Nation of Islam.
3. Guymore (1988) notes just some of these; see also S. Clarke (1980); Sewell (1990);
Waters (1985), Chevannes (1995: 99-109) deals more systematically with the myths
associated with Garvey among Jamaican Rastafarians, and probes the probable ongins of
some of these.
4. Among the few trenchantly critical accounts of Garvey’s career is Clarence FE. Walker

(1991: xxiii-v, 84-55), depicting him as a ‘charlatan’ whose appeals to racial umity were

‘selfserving, empty slogans’ contaming ‘proto-fascist clements’, and whose ideology and
following reflected Caribbean rather than Afro-American preoccupations (ibid: xxv, 54).
5. What scems to me the most thorough and compelling latter-day interpretation of
Fanon’s thought ts Sekyr-Otu (1996),
86 AFROCENTRISM

6. The book is recommended and advertised by the Farrakhan movement, and 1s

praised (though misinterpreted) by leading Afrocentric scholars like Molefi Asante. For
an earlier racial-essentialist appropriation of Rodney's message, see Uya (1982).
7. For the origin of these tdeas in Rodney's thought, see R. Lewis (1994).
8. The most obviously direct pomt of comparison though Nicholls
—
does not actually
make the connection would
—

be with the almost simultaneously published celebration of

peasant life and culture by Nazi theorist Walther Darre: Das Bauerntum als Lebensquellder
Nordischen Rasse (1929). On Price-Mars's thought and circumstances, see also Shannon
(1996).
9. See, as sources for the following argument, Nicholls (1979: 167~72; 194-200; ch. 8
passim, 1985: chs 1-3, 12); Dash (1981: ch. 4); Trouillot (1990: chs 4-7); Ferguson (1987:
ch, 2); Taylor 1989; plus two sensationalist accounts which none the less contain useful
material: Abbott (1988: chs 3-5); Diederich and Burt (1969).
 8

Afro-America as Nation,
and as Internal Colony

I have suggested, I think uncontroversially,

that Afrocentrism at least —

outside Africa itself is by definition a species of culturalnationalism. This

-

means, rather obviously, that its adherents must conceive of themselves as

belonging to, analysing and advocating the interests not just of an ethnic
group, community, or even
a a race, but a nation, in some way distinct from
the majority (Euro-)American nationality. How could this nation best be
described? The most recurringly popular answer among Afro-American
nationalists has been: as an
oppressed, colonized national minority within
the United States. Indeed, it to that although
Afrocentrists, unlike many previous
seems

brands
me

of cultural nationalists
present-day
in the
USA, have not normally used the term ‘internal colony’ to describe their

position, that idea -

or one
very like it ~
is a
logical or even necessary
foundation for their beliefs.
The notion of African-Americans as a distinct nationality has a
long but
uneven
history.' Black‘politicalleaders and writers had intermittently
referred to themselves as
part ofa national group from the earliest
separate the Yet such
recorded statements of their political views up to present.
terminology was
frequently vague in the extreme, with words like ‘race’,
‘nation’ and even ‘tribe’, or later ‘culture’ and ‘ethnic group’, being used
loosely and often interchangeably as, indeed, —

they have been in many

other contexts. As August Mcicr suggests, many Afro-American publicists
described themselves as a
separate group or (less often) nationality to

emphasize the way they were excluded and belittled by other Americans,
but insisted separation was thrust upon them rather
that this than desired:

they themselves sought full acceptance as

unhyphenated Americans. This
ambivalence was neatly captured in the declaration by the assimilationist,
conservative black journal the Cleveland Gazette, in 1886: ‘Like other nation-
alities constituting the American family, we have struggled for constitutional

government and constitutional liberty’ (Meier 1966: 53).

Invocations of the idea of Afro-American
nationality, as this implies, did
not necessarily involve advocacyof a political programme of nationalzsm, let
alone separatism. Their uses were often, perhaps, mainly tactical: asserting
a collective
identity as a means to stake claims to greater respect, resources

87
88 AFPROCENTRISM

or
power within American society, or to rally a constituency as a
power base
for such ambitions —
not to separate from it entirely. The conception of

nationality involved was thus nearly always a cultural one, rather than

partaking of the aim associated with nearly all political nationalisms since
the French Revolution: that of political independence as a ‘nation-state’.
This is as true of Afrocentrism as of its precursors: very few of its

spokespeople appear to have any serious desire either for mass

emigration
to Africa or for full political and geographical separation within the
Americas.
The concept of internal colonialism, by contrast, is a fairly recent one,

but it has had a very wide variety of applications globe. It right across the
has been taken up since the 1960s, especially but not only by left-wing and
Marxist thinkers, to denote processes such as
English domination over

Wales, Scotland and Ireland (Hechter 1975), South Alrican apartheid

policies (Wolpe 1988), class and ethnic stratification in Latin America

(Stavenhagen 1965, 1973, 1975), Isracli oppression of the Palestinians (Ram

1993; Shafir 1989; Zureik 1979), and the position of oppressed ‘national
minorities’ in numerous states. From one
point of view, pretty much ail

history can be seen as a history of internal colonialism: as indicated, for

instance, by Robert Bartlett’s demonstration of how much the development
of medieval Europe was a story of conquest and colonization by a Latinate—
Frankish core over its neighbours (Bartlett 1993). Using the concept in the
present, however, has had more
specific and politically charged connota-
tions. It has implied taking sides in complex arguments over whether, how
far and in what ways the position of minorities within advanced capitalist
countries could be described as
equivalent to that of colonized peoples in
the European overseas empires a dispute that is felt to have strong political
—

implications. It was intertwined, often in confused ways, with the question

of whether the political struggles of people of African, Caribbean or Asian
descent in the USA, Britain or elsewhere in the Atlantic world should focus

primarily on their countries of residence or on those of their or their

ancestors’ origin.
The most basic claim of any argument asserting that a situation is one of
internal colonialism is that there is an exploitative relationship between the
dominant community or communities within a state and minority or

peripheral communities. primary Thus the thrust is in most versions an

economic though
one, supplemented by stress on political disadvan-
often

tage or powerlessness. Frequently this stress on

exploitative relations is
associated with the dominant group's cconomic activities being scen as

diversified, and associated with industrialization, advanced technology, and

high skill and wage levels. Evidently this picture connects with the colonial

analogy only if the differentiation is to some considerable degree a spatial

one: that there are
exploiting and exploited regions within the state. If this
dimension docs not exist, the exploitation is hard to separate analytically
from one of social class. On the other hand, a merelyregional differentiation
would not seem to meet the case for seeing a situation as colonial. There
 AFRO-AMERICA AS NATION, AND AS INTERNAL COLONY 89

would also have to be at least a

significant cultural differentiation between

exploiters and exploited. Perhaps more, it might be necessary for significant

numbers of those concerned to conceive of it as a national distinction.
Some advocates would
of the internal-colonial
reject the stringency model
of these conditions,
arguing geographical or cultural differentia-
that ether
tion between exploiters and exploited is enough to define the situation as

colonial. This is most evidently the case in applications of the model to

African-Americans, who do not have a

geographically distinct ‘homeland’.
But there are difficulties even in cases, sometimes described as internal-
colonial ones, where both conditions apply —

for instance, as Anthony Birch

points out, neither Scotland within Quebec the UK nor in Canada has been
marked by particularly specialized or non-industrialized economies, nor

have their natives been underrepresented in positions of political power

(Birch 1989: 67-8).
to
Theconcept colonialism,
internal
¢ of,
asa
way describe |of
thesituation 0

the "political
shift from Civil Rights integrationistcampaigns
toa ‘Thetorie
of
Black Power, a revived
separatism, and an increasinglyrevolutionary temper
in some Afro-American circles. Yet the internal colony thesis also had a long
prehistory, starting in the international Communist movement, in the
comintern’s and Communist Party of the USA’s 1930s ‘black belt thesis.
This has aptly been described as ‘the most obscure and puzzling chapter
in the history of American Communism’ (Draper 1960: 315). Issues of race,

on
global scale,
a had from the Third International’s foundation been
under rubric of ‘the national and colonial
placedby Moscow in what
the
‘the of the
question’,
East’. Otto
or —

was initially a ncarsynonym

—

peoples
Huiswood, one of the handful of early US black Communists, told the
Comintern’s Fourth Congress as early as 1922 that factors of racial and
colonial oppression must be taken into account in relation to Afro-Amcrica.
An international
‘Negro congress’ including Afro-Americans, it was sug-
gested, should be called. Despite this, American Communists initially treated
the issue of US blacks as
essentially, if not solely, one of class. And since
American Communism in the early and mid 1920s had virtually no black
members, being overwhelmingly comprised of diverse European migrants’
‘foreign language sections’ (Buhle 1987: 121-43), the question was of

largely symbolic importance.

The Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928 radically transformed the official
Communist line on Afro-Americans, as on a
great deal else. In the context

of Stalin's ascendancy in the Soviet Union's internal struggles,

power and of
the general turn to ‘Third Period’ ultra-leftism, the Congress adopted a new

and militantly sectarian stance on

questions of colonial liberation. The US
situation was subsumed within this, with Afro-Americans in the ‘black belt’
states of the American South defined as an
oppressed, colonized nation for
whom self-determination should be demanded. For blacks in the industrial
North, by contrast, only calls for racial and class equality were stipulated.
This bifurcation, and the reasoning behind it, were never clearly spelled
90 AFROCENTRISM

out at the Congress. Evidently, though, they derived mostly from a schematic
universalization of the Soviet Union's own nationalities policy the officially
—

proclaimed one, not the far more

oppressive and centralizing reality.
Neither black nor white US Communists themselves had called for this
stance; indeed, most of them had argued strongly against defining the Afro-
American situation as a ‘national’ one. In so far as there was a base of

support for the idea among African-Americans, it seems to have come from
the small nexus of black students who studied at the Soviet University of
Toilers of the East during the 1920s.?
Thus US Communists saddled with an evidently unworkable
were dual

strategy: for the piously proclaimed integrationism involving bitter

North, a

hostility to all black nationalist or

separatist groupings; for the South,
advocacy of black self-determination including the right to secession (which
would, naturally, be desirable under capitalism but not necessarily under a
Soviet USA).? The former involved, in particular, bitter attacks on Garvey-
ism, major if largely unsuccessful attempts to recruit in Harlem, and
ostentatious purges of alleged racisis in the CPUSA’s own ranks. The
latter, southern strategy included an
outpouring of arguments for self-
determination in Communist publications (including even maps showing
the boundaries of the proposed ‘black republic’) and efforts to organize
black sharecroppers and other farmers in the South. These had some
poor
shortlived success; but there is no evidence that slogans of national
liberation contributed to it (Klehr 1984; Draper 1960: ch. 15). Both facets
of the policy undoubtedly involved as later Afro-American -

critics like
Harold Cruse bitterly alleged heavy doses -—
of paternalism and

manipulation.
The call for ‘black belt’ self-determination was largely abandoned —-

silently, without discussion after the 1935 Seventh

—
Comintern Congress.
This new shift was again the result of Moscow's changing strategic needs
rather than of any indigenous US let alone African-American
—
initiative. ~

The CPUSA dissolved the main ‘front’ organization which had been

pressing for selfdetermination, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.

Officially, the doctrine had not been repudiated; and in 1946, with the
demise of CPUSA leader Earl Browder’s strategy of appealing to American
‘exceptionalism’ and patriotism, it was revived in what Draper calls ‘a slightly
watered-down version as a
programmatic
—

demand and not as an immediate

slogan of action’ (Draper 1960: 355). According to one Party veteran, it
aroused some enthusiasm among younger black members in the late 1940s

(George Charney, quoted in Robinson 1983: 346).

Only in 1958, well after Stalin’s death, was the ‘black belt’ thesis formally
buried by the CPUSA. migration The great of Afro-Americans to northern
cities and the rising tide of the Civil Rights movement apparently made such
nationalist appeals always dubiously compatible with orthodox Marxism —
—

irrelevant. But within a

very few years a new gencration of black intellectuals
was to revive the notion of an
oppressed Afro-American nation. One of the
 AFRO-AMERICA AS NATION, AND AS INTERNAL COLONY 91

first -

and among the most historically informed —

writers to
employ it was

Harold Cruse. As he argued in 1967:

Africans and West Indians were never allowed to forget that they were

colonial subjects. But the fact that the American Negro was also a subject, of
a
special kind of North American domestic colonialism, was never fully
accepted cither by the Negro himself nor
by Africans or West Indians. Back
in the 1920s, during the Haywood—Huiswood—Briggs controversy within the
Communist Party, the West Indians did not want to classify American Negroes
as colonials. It was not until 1962 that even the new Afro-American National-
ists began to see the domestc colonialist nature of the Negro’s position in
the United States. (Cruse 1967/1984: 433)

The main point of the whole argument for Cruse, then, was not to explore
the internal-colonial model in itself, but rhetorically to invoke it as further
evidence of the irreducibly national-cultural nature of all ‘left’ politics in
the USA. This is by no means an unreasonable view, since at least from
some
perspectives the whole history not only of Afro-American politics but
of American socialism can best be analysed through the shifting loyalties
and alignments of immigrant, ethnic national groupings for a more

recent and Icss polemical on

or

these lines than Cruse’s,

(see,
Buhie 1987).
doubt
analysis
Cruse’s ethnicist would
One may, however, (some say anti-Semitic)
insistence driving forces behind
that the the disputes over Afro-American
identity were largely Jewish and secondarily West Indian ‘racial’ chauvin-
isms. His choice of 1962 as originating point of the revived awareness was.

one
suspects, dictated by the fact that his own first published discussion of
the internal-colonial thesis (later collected in Cruse 1968) appeared then.
The rediscovered concept of internal colonialism reccived its most fully
articulated Afro-American formulations in Stokely Carmichael and Charles
V. Hamilton’s book Black Power (1967/9), in Robert Allen's Black Awakening
in Capetalist America (1969), and in Robert Blauner's Racial Oppression m
America (1972), Carmichael and Hamilton suggested its immediate ancestry
by quoting black sociologist Kenneth Clark and radical journalist LF. Stone,
who had evoked the colonial idea, as rhetorical trope and as
analogy
respectively, in 1965 and 1966 (Carmichacl and Hamilton 1967/9: 19).
Neither Clark nor Stone had in fact developed the parallel further.
Carmichael and Hamilton, in their effort to do so, initially identified
colonialism as ‘another name’ for institutionalized racism (ibid.: 22), They
immediately admitted that ‘the analogy is not perfect’, because of the lack
of geographical separation of the races and the fact that Afro-America

exported only labour, not goods, to the dominant sector. However, they
suggested —pointing to South Africa and to what was then called Rhodesia
—

that the USA was not unique in the former, and that the latter was a

‘technicality’ (ibid.). They then pursued the argument for black Americans’
colonial status through political, economic and social
aspects.
Politically, they argued, US ‘pluralism’ was a myth in relation to racial
92 AFROCENTRISM

questions, where all black assertions faced a white power bloc as monolithic
as that formed by colonial rulers (22-6). What black
political leadership
there was amounted to no more than what they considered, evoking West
African parallels, precise analogy to colonial
to be a ‘indirect rule’ systems
(26-32). On the economic
front, they relied on a conception of ‘normal’
colonialism as necessarily motivated by the extraction of profit for the

metropolis(32~3); and saw Afro-America as exploited in exactly the same

way (33-9). Their focus here was overwhelmingly on northern, urban

ghetto conditions rather than on rural or southern African Americans.

Socially, they emphasized denial of equal status and racial defamation,

which they believed had ‘taught the subject to hate himself and to deny his

own humanity’ (47).

Yet at no point did Carmichael and Hamilton call Afro-Americans a

national group, advocate violent revolution (despite saying, more as

warning
than in hope, that liberation would be sought ‘by whatever means
necessary’
|187]), or imply belief in secession. Instead, their rather modest call was for
‘new political forms which will be the link between broadened participation
(now occurring) and legitimate government (184).
Blauner’s agenda was in a sense wider, for he wished to argue the validity
not only of an Afro-American perception of their situation as colonial, but
of the then new notion of a ‘Third World’ coalition among colonially
oppressed groups in the USA. Even if invocations of such a coalition were

largely dictated by immediate political motives, he suggested, the parallel

was valid because:

{TJhe experience of people of color in this country does include a number

of circumstances that are universal to the colonial situation, and these are

the very circumstances that differentiate third world realities from those of
the European immigrants. The first... is that of a forced entry into the
second to various
larger society metropolitan domain.
or The is subjection

forms of unfree labour that greatly restrict tie physical and social mobility of
the group and its parucipation in the political arena. The third is a cultural

policy of the colonizer that constrains, transforms, or destroys original values,

orientations, and ways of life. (Blauner 1972: 53)

Thereafter Blauner narrowed his focus somewhat to concentrate on Afro-

America. There, he —
in common with most other radical analysts of the
time, almost whatever their theoretical orientation —
identified lack of black

political representation, the undermining of cultural traditions, and social

discrimination as the key problems. A further factor —

separate labour status

—
was only as an afterthought (ibid.: 84). He did, though, return
added to

the theme of geographical separation as an element in internal colonialism

(85-91; 95-102). In identifying the internal colony as a physical space,
Blauner's focus —
like Carmichael and Hamilton’s and unlike that of the
1930s Communist theorists —
was on the urban black ghettoes rather than
the rural South. He saw the 1960s ghetto revolts, in this context, as
 AFRO-AMERICA AS NATION, AND AS INTERNAL COLONY 93

movements for decolonization: but once

again the conclusions drawn are

not fully separatist or secessionist. Rather, Blauner called for the ‘colonized’
to be given the choice between local self-government (seemingly identified
as little more than black-run inner-city authorities) and fuller participation
in US national life (104).
Meanwhile, if these were unusually extended analyses, the less systematic,
more
purely agitational rhetoric of internal colonialism seemed, for a time,
nearly ubiquitous. Eldridge Cleaver, for instance, used the notion in rather

sketchy and haphazard ways, as

part of a rhetorical case
associating the
struggles of US blacks with those
peoples of Third World and a
generalized
notion oppressed’ (e.g. 1970: 69-70; 108; 118-20; 1971: 44-6; and
of ‘the
most extensively 1971: 80-94), though he initially employed the term itself
only by way of a quotation from Nkrumah (1970: 108), and did not draw
fully separatist political conclusions from its use. Only, it seems, after his
association with the Black Panther party did he adopt the colonial analogy
in a substantial way. And even then this was less a coherent presentation of
a case than a moment in a polemic asserting the primacy of desire among
Afro-Americans for land of their own (1971: 85), proclaiming the need for
Afro-America to ‘assume its sovereignty, to demand that that sovereignty be

recognized by other nations of the world’ (ibid.: 89), to articulate Black

Panther calls for a
plebiscite on black sclf-determination (91-2), and -

rather inconsistently —

to urge that guerrilla war was the only means for

black liberation (92-4).
Poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, similarly, invoked the idea that “Black is
a Country’ as part of a sweeping rhetorical claim for Afro-American struggles
as ‘only a microcosm of the struggle of the new countries all over the world’
(Baraka/Jones 1966: 85). And most influentially of all, Malcolm X urged in
1965:

We are
living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro
is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has
characterised this era...
. It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as

simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a purely American

problem. Rather, we are
today secing a global rebellion of the oppressed

against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter. (quoted in Marable
1984: 95)

And in his subsequently famous 1964 speech ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’,
Malcolm X proclaimed:

America is just as much as a colonial

England ever power was.... What do

you call second-class citizenship? Why, that’s colonization, Second-class

citizenship is nothing but twentieth-century slavery.... Just as it took

nationalism to remove colonialism from Asia and Africa, iv ll take black
nationalism) today to remove colonialism from the minds of twenty-two
million Afro-Americans here in this country. (Gates and McKay 1997; 94)
94 AFROGENTRISM

Thus for Cleaver, Jones, Malcolm X and others, the colonial analogy was

above all an
argument in service of an African-American nationalist claim.
This had not been the case in the 1930s, when Communists advancing the
‘black belt’ thesis were simultaneously bitterly hostile to Afro-American
cultural nationalist groupings; nor was it the purpose of Carmichael,
Blauner and others who sought to
give the concept some analytical content.

In the hands of black nationalist groups from the mid 1960s onwards, it was

far less an analytical tool than a

part of the emotional atmosphere of the

day: one
compounded of swirling currents of violence in Vietnam, from —

white racists, from police and other state authorities, in ghetto uprisings,
and among some black political organizations themselves and of often —

undirected enthusiasm for African and other Third World independence

movements, Its manifestations included the widespread invocations of
Fanon’'s writings and those of various African independence leaders; though
how widely these texts were actually read is, of course, quite another
question. There was a
popular adoption of names, dress, language codes
(above all fragmentary Swahili) derived or
purportedly so from~
African —

originals: the most systematized being Maulana Ron Karenga’s ‘Kawaida’

doctrine. There was far the most
~

lastingly valuable legacy of the cra a -

sharply novel and politicized sensibility in the arts, especially poctry and
jazz.! Moving behind the trends came a clutch of cultural nationalist ‘Black
Aesthetic’ critical and cultural theories (traced, in polemical vein, in H.
Baker 1984: esp. 71-87).
Amid this highly charged political and cultural environment, to complain
at the lack of coherent social theory underpinning the cra’s use of internal-
colonial imagery is almost beside the point. Many of the proponents of an

African-American cultural unashamedly irrationalist,

nationalism draw-
were

ing on the legacies of Garveyism and of the Nation of Islam in style if not in
ideological substance. Some attracted charges of nihilism and even ‘black
fascism’ from critics like Addison Gayle and later Manning Marable (Mara-
ble 1984: 120-21). Some interpreted ‘Black Power’ as meaning above all
‘black capitalism’. Others, moving away from the more mystical or quasi-
religious forms of cultural nationalism like that of Elijah Muhammad’s
Black Muslims (Essien-Udom 1964; Lincoln 1961), had their possible
ideological evolution cut brutally short. This happened with the most
charismatically influential figure of all, Malcolm X, leaving enduring
controversy about his final political views and their significance a contro- —

versy revived in the carly {990s when Malcolm's image, boosted by Spike
Lee’s high-profile film biography, attained renewed salience (sce B. Perry
1992). And some black nationalist groups moved into violent insurrection-

ary action albeit under —

a
degree of state pressure or
manipulation which
is also lastingly controversial. The scale of such action was never
very great;
though between 1969 and 1975 twenty-six police officers were killed in

gunfights with black militants (Gurr 1989: 212), and a somewhat larger
number of armed radicals were killed dy the police, sometimes in very
murky circumstances. As Ted Robert Gurr comments:
 AFRO-AMERICA AS NATION, AND AS INTERNAL COLONY 95

It is evident that armed violence by handfuls of black militants was the last

deadly derivative of a movement that won most of its victories through

peaceful protest in the early 1960s. militancy had largely subsided
Black by
the early 1970s. ... In the 1980s reports and journalistic sources
FBI provide
no evidence of any further organized violence by black militants. (ibid.: 213)°

If the logical conclusion of beliefs that Afro-America was an

oppressed
nation or internal colony was armed revolution —

as many militants

proclaimed, especially in the late 1960s —

then that conclusion was not

pursued by any numerous group to any significant degree.® Where there

was large-scale violent action, as in the various inner-city disturbances or

such incidents as the Attica prison uprising of 1971, almost all the deaths
were by the guns of state forces. Affairs like the Attica revolt, which ended
in the deaths of twenty-nine prison inmates and ten guards they had whom
taken hostage proved that the dead guards were almost all
killed by the
(investigation
of their
bullets ‘rescuers’, not by the prisoners), involved much
Third-Worldist and liberationist rhetoric. The Attica prisoners included
among their demands a call for ‘speedy and safe transportation out of
confinement, to a non-imperialistic country’ (Wicker 1978: 396), but this
does not seem to have been accompanied by any articulation of the black
radical prisoners’ own situation as a colonial one, rather than as
part of
some generalized category of the oppressed. In California especially, some

militants identified themselves with “Third World’ revolution, and

prison
saw themselves potential insurrectionary asvanguard; but they were
a a

small, isolated group increasingly cut off from US political realities, as the
fates of George Jackson and then of the ‘Symbionese Liberation Army’
miserably demonstrated (see the disenchanted retrospective analysis in
Cummins 1994).
Another apparently logical deduction from the belief that Afro-Americans
were an internal colony of the USA was the idea of
geographical separation
and selfdetermination ~
of carving out an independent ‘black republic’
within the USA. American Communists’ advocacy of this idea in the 1930s
had met an
unhappy fate, but some
groups revived it in the 1960s. Best
known by far was the Nation of Islam, whose demands for independent
territory to be granted by way of reparations for past black suffering varied
wildly with time and circumstances —

from wanting two US states to be

ceded to them,
through to an insistence that twenty-five would not be too

many (Van Deburg 1992: 140-44). It is doubtful, though, whether this kind
of evidently impractical played major demand a role in the movement's
the Republic of New Africa, had
popular appeal. A much smaller group,
clearer-cut. proposals, which they put before the public in 1968. The states
of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina would form
the new black republic, funded by $400 billion ‘start-up’ moncy from the
US government. If these modest demands were not met, the territory would
be seized by force, liberated by the ‘New African Security Force’ and its
urban guerrilla sympathizers. The new sovercign republic would devote
96 AFROCENTRISM

itself to reviving authentic African valucs, which apparently included

compulsory military service, a
tightly controlled press, hostility to trade
unions and encouragement of polygamy (Van Deburg 1992: 144-9). The
Republic of New Africa, too, has retained or revived a certain influence into
the 1990s: the bestselling memoirs of former Los Angeles ghetto gangster
‘Monster’ Kody Scott attribute his conversion from violent crime to their
ideas, and those of
generally Afrocentrism The more (Shakur 1993).
organization played an active part in the campaign for the US
has
government to pay reparations, compensating African-Americans for centur-
ies of slavery and exploitation (see Van Deburg [ed.] 1997: 333-41).
As 1960s black militancy fragmented or wound down, still other black
radicals persisted in or made their way towards -
various kinds of socialist —

politics: most often a variety of Marxist—black nationalist syntheses. It was

in these circles that the internal-colonial model remained persistingly alive.
Thus LeRoi Jones, renamed Amiri Baraka and in transit from cultural
nationalism to Marxism—Leninism, asserted of his home town:

There is a clearer feeling in Newark, than in any other city | have ever been

in, of Colonialism. Newark is @

colony. A bankrupt ugly colony, in the classic
term, where white people make their money to take away with them.

(‘Newark ~
Before Black Men Conquered’ [1969], in Baraka 1979: 178:
original emphasis)

And a few years later, having come to (at least temporary) ideological rest

with an aggressively crude Maoism, he returned to the theme, now by way

of proclaiming that blacks in the US ‘Old South’ were a nation as defined

by Stalin:

It is this Afro-American nation, which still exists in the Black Belt South, that
was and is oppressed by U.S. imperialism, in the same fashion imperialism
oppresses other nations in the Third World (Asia, Africa and Latin America).
But since the Afro-American nation actually exists on the land base of the
United States, the approach to its liberation is somewhat more complex than
many of the colonial questions whose solution is to be made by revolution,
though make no mistake, the only solution to the Afro-American national

question 1s
by violent armed revolution, socialist revolution! (‘Black Libera-
tion/Socialist Revolution’ [1976], in ibid.: 211; also in Baraka 1984b)

But the apparent clarity of this Maoist version of the internal colonialism
thesis is deceptive; for Baraka argued elsewhere that although the Afro-
American bourgeoisie had made gains since the 1950s:

with this largely false ‘clout the black and

what being created
is bourgeoisie
of the black is
petite bourgeoisie have achieved as a result mass struggle, a

kind of neocolonialism, although the black nation in the United States is not
 AFRO-AMERICA AS NATION, AND AS INTERNAL COLONY 97

a
colony but an
oppressed nation, fighting for the right of self-determination.

(‘“Clout”: What Is 1?’ [1977], in Baraka 1984b: 74; original emphasis)

Unlike Third World national liberation

struggles which, according to
—

Maoist orthodoxy, might include the

participation of the national bourgeoi-
sie —

the Afro-American struggle would apparently necessarily be led by the

working class, and result in socialism. This followed from the fact of the
USA’s advanced capitalist status; but it is quite unclear what is meant by —

or what the significance may be of —persistently describing black Americans

as a nation subject to imperialist (sometimes called colonial) domination,
but not actually a colony, If it is not a colony, and if its hoped-for revolution
will necessarily be a socialist one, what is the point of insisting on its absolute

right to selfdetermination or secession (as Baraka does in ‘Marxism and

the Black Community’ in 1984b) even if the latter
—

were
physically possible?
This begins to read like Malcolm X recast in pseudo-Marxist language; or,

alternatively, the disputes of the Second International repeated as farce. In

fact Baraka’s eventual position, expressed in a dreadfully dogmatic and
obfuscatory Maoistjargon light years away from the vivid style of his literary
and cultural writings, seemed to be that Afro-Americans in the ‘black belt’
were a nation with the right to secession, while those elsewhere were not

Today’, in Baraka 1984b, esp. 102-5), In other

(e.g. ‘Black Liberation
words, he had reverted to precisely the stance adopted by the Comintern
during the ‘Third Period’. This view, though, was neither clearly nor
consistently formulated.
In somewhat similar vein, and a little earlier, George Jackson's prison
writings, adopting a mixture of separatist and Maoist~Leninist belicis much
ideas, regularly referred to the
influenced by the Black Panthers’ position
of US blacks as a colonial one, though again without fully developing the
idea, and simultancously putting forward a
highly schematic two-class model
of American society, proclaiming that its political system was fascist (Jackson
1972; sce also Cummins 1994). Other, less personally prominent analysts
also continued with or reverted to the internal-colonial thesis during the
1970s and 1980s. They included veteran 1960s racticals like James Forman
(1981) and James Boggs (1970); and the theoreticians of several minuscule
Trotskyist and Maoist formations.’ As Cornel West says, the thesis:

with its ahistorical racial determination of a nation, its flaccid statistical

determination of national boundaries, and its iHusory distinct black national

economy ... functions as a

poor excuse for the absence of a
sophisticated
Marxist theory of the specificity of Afro-American oppression. (West 1988:

20)

But as West also remarks, for all their inadequacies, such notions
remained hegemonic among African-American socialists.
image The
retained force even among analysts who rejected its literal validity tout court
rather than, like Baraka, ambivalently and inconsistently. Thus Manning
98 AFROCENTRISM

Marable specifically colonial

adopted trope for
a the title and polemical
thrust of Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
his How America alluding to
—

Rodney's How Europe UnderdevelopedAfrica urging

—

that Black America was

deliberately ‘underdeveloped’ by US capitalism:

Blacks are an integral and necessary part of an imperialistic and powerful

capitalist society, yet they exist in terms of actual socioeconomic and political
power as a kind of Third World nation. As a result, Black America shares
some similaritics with other national minorities or
oppressed nationalities
within European countries. (Marable 1983: 10)

Yet he insisted that ‘the race/class dialectic in the United States cannot be

adequately or accurately described as neocolonial’ (ibid.: 135), and did not

in fact ordinarily speak of African-Amcricans as a nation.

More recently the concept of internal colonialism has sometimes come to

be used in virtually scattergun fashion, applied to any and every situation of

racial minorities. Thus African-American feminist writer Andree Nicola

McLaughlin, in sketch of black women’s positions across the

a
global
coins the of the of
Anglophone world, term ‘people colony’ on
analogy
—

people of colour -

to embrace black Americans, British and South Africans,

New Zealand Maori, and various Pacific islanders (McLaughlin 1990: 152).
This involves her not only in embracing the aggressively antiliberal and

ant-pluralist. perspective of extreme Maori cultural nationalists (ibid.:

159-62), the minority black British current which rejects even a
hyphenated
‘British’ identity (163-7) and the internal colonialism thesis for Afro-
America (167-74), but also in endorsing the ‘primacy of the land’ thesis of
South Africa’s PAC without
apparently even
-

being aware that this is a

minority view rejected by the far more widely supported ANC (156-9). And
bell hooks can lament at length and rather oddly, given the evidence
—
we

have just surveyed —

that analysis of Afro-America has failed to use the

language of colonialism or think of US blacks as

beimg in a colonial
situation.
hooks asserts:

there hasn’t been a

major discourse of decolonization in the US ... words
like ‘colonization’ and ‘decolonization’ aren’t allowed to
play a role....

[The] reproduction of the drama of victimization is totally tied to the lack of

a whole critical theory and practice around coionization and decolonization.

(in Gilroy 1993b: 217)

hooks is not entirely wrong when she goes on to argue that reincorporating
the concept of colonialism into Afro-American social thought might force a

renewed internationalism opposed

as present to the fixation on the USA’s,
and American blacks’, uniqueness, and might facilitate greater attention to

issues of class, economics and gender (ibid.: 222-3). But in her apparent
lack of interest in the fate of past uses of the idea —

by no means always
 AFRO-AMERICA AS NATION, AND AS INTERNAL COLONY 99

internationalist, or
involving attention to concrete economic problems, let
alone to gender she fails even
—-
to ask why such earlier intellectual
movements fragmented, failed and lost their popular appeal. The reason,

surely, is first and foremost that the notion of Afro-America as colony is

simply not a cohcrent one.

Thus we see that the earlicr uses of the idea of internal colonialism

deployed it as an economic and/or sociological category; but it has

increasingly been changed into a

primarily cultural phenomenon. Yet
whereas in some other cases —

such as that of Ireland —

this shift from

economics to culture has been accompanied by an increasing sophistication
of analysis, with theories of cultural imperialism being substantially more
varied and subtle than analyses of economic colonialism, for ‘internal
colonialisin’ in Afro-America the reverse has been the case. Some of the
analyses cast in predominantly socioeconomic terms have had considerable
scholarly weight. The cultural interpretations have on the whole been
shallowly polemical, irrationalist, and quite devoid of any serious proposals
for social change.
There seems no reason, in any
any particularcase, to suppose that

political strategy follows necessarily

adoption model. from
Conversely, of the
no
particular set of policy proposals necessarily requires adoption of the
internal-colonial analysis rather than some other except perhaps the call —

for revolution, which in some circumstances (like those of Afro-Americans)

appears hard to sustain except through use of the colonial model. While
revolutionary sentiments could in principle be mobilized among Afro-
Americans, Hispanic Americans,
or on some other basis social ~
such as
class membership a
specifically racial- or cthnic-based
-

insurrectionary
politics would seem to require the colonial model as a
necessary though -

of course woefully insufficient -

condition. Short of this, it is evidently
possible to involving strong recognition of community
support strategies
rights on
many other bases than that of defining the community as a nation
or an internal colony. Indeed, it is hard to sec what help such a definition
gives to the advancement of such rights,

Notes

1. For general histories of such ideas and their contexts, see (amid a large literature)
Geiss (1974); Hall (1978); Moses (1978); Pinkney (1976); Stuckey (1987).
2.C. Robinson (1983: 306-7) places the roots of the concept among these, especially
Harry Haywood; see also McClellan (1993).
3.On these ideas and disputes see Gruse (1967/1984: Part I passen), CG. Robinson
(1983: 291-311); Haywood 1978.
4.On the relatons between ‘black power’ politics and free jazz, see
Baraka/Jones
(1967); Kofsky (1970); Wilmer (1980),
5. The view that violent protest achieved almost nothing for African-Americans, or was

actually counterproductive compared to the record of peaceful agitation, is strongly

endorsed in perhaps the most careful historical overview of a century's black liberationist
politics: Fredrickson (1995).
6.1t would have been an
illogical conclusion in
any case, since contrary to much
100 AFROCENTRISM

and rhetoric, the great majority of former European colonies’

contemporary subsequent
decoloniations were achieved without significant military conflict. ef al.
Ouuaw in M. Davis
4 See summaries and references by Cornel West and Lucius
116-17, 260); and West (1988; 19~20, 26).
(1987: 83-4,
 9

African Cultures and the New World

Debate over African survivals or cultural retentions in the Americas has

been intense and complex for several decades now. Initially this was a
highly
polarized dispute, conducted between those -
like Melville Herskovits
(1941/1958) —

who made very strong claims for a

near-ubiquity of recogniz-
ably African cultural traits among Afro-Americans, and those —

like black

sociologist Franklin Frazier —

who asserted that such retentions were

negligible. Neither extreme position appears tenable in the light of more

recent research. John Thornton (1992: Part II) gives an even-handed

overview of the current state of scholarship on the issuc, stressing particu-
larly that the search for this or that African ‘trait’ or ‘survival’ is misleading,
since cultures exist in some sense as totalities, and are
always in a state of

change. emphasizes, as do Robert

He also Farris Thompson (1983) and a

growing number of others including now most influentially — —

Paul Gilroy
(1993a), how what emerged was a specifically black Adlantic cultural com-

plex, rather than one which was African, European and/or American. In
relation to religious practices, for instance:

The result was the emergence of a new Afro-Atlantic religion that was often
identified as Christian, especially in the New World, but was a
type of

Christianity that could satisfy both African and European understandings of

religion. (Thornton 1992: 235)

On the whole, we can say that historians and anthropologists have tended
towards greater caution about the extent of continuing New World African-
isms, whereas literary and cultural critics have made stronger claims about
them; though almost all serious scholars are more recognize such
ready to

‘survivals’ than would have been the case two generations ago.' It is also
fairly generally accepted that clearly identifiable African elements are far
less in black North American cultures than in those of Brazil, or
significant
of several Caribbean territories. Whereas specific Africanisms can be traced
in considerable detail in the popular culture, say, of Jamaica (see, for

example, Alleyne [1988]; Glazier [ed.] [1993]) or among the Maroons of

101
 102 AFROCENTRISM

Suriname (see Richard Price’s remarkable First Time [1983]), and perhaps
most of all in Haiti, scholars have been far less able to do so in the USA.
There are a number of reasons for this. Blacks formed a
proportion lower
of the population in even the most intensely slave-labour-dependent parts
of the United States than they did in many Caribbean islands, in the Guianas
or in the plantation regions of Brazil. Most US plantations were small —

indeed, the word itself is often a misnomer for the family-run farms and

workshops in which the majority of slaves laboured as

against the
—

sometimes vast, industrial-scale slave enterprises of Santo Domingo, Bahia

Jamaica. At any given time, the
or proportion of African-born people in the
enslaved population of the US South scems to have been considerably lower
than in many regions further south and east —

for the simple reason that life

expectancy was
normally greater in the former, so that labour forces were
not so constanuy, massively replenished by new imports. Additionally, large-
scale importations of slaves ceased earlier in North Amcrica than they did
in Brazil or Cuba, for instance. And it may well be that in the USA, the
slaves living and working in any particular area, and thus in contact with
one another, were more likely to be from a variety of linguistic and cultural

backgrounds than elsewhere. It is notable that much of the strongest

evidence of distinct Africanisms in North America comes from the coast

and islands of Georgia and South Carolina, where these conditions were

least evident: where, for instance, large-scale slave imports continued later,
black-white ratios were higher and owners more often absentee than
elsewhere in the USA. Here, to a
greater extent than anywhere else in
continental North America, scholars have found clear African continuities
in language (e.g. L. Turner 1973), in social organization (Creel 1988), and
in arts and crafts (R. Thompson 1969, 1983; Vlach 1978).
All these factors made the persistence of specific African cultural patterns
less possible, and acculturation into new, syncretic but heavily European-
influenced patterns more rapid and fuller in the USA than further south, It
is also sometimes suggested that US slaveholders, perhaps Anglophone
or

ones
generally, were less tolerant of their vassals sustaining African linguistic,
religious, recreational and other cultural forms than were their equivalents
in Spanish, French Portuguese colonies:and a distinction in its turn
sometimes linked to religious differences that is, the Catholic—Protestant ~

division. Put more positively, the activities of Protestant Christian evangelists,

notably Baptists, often anti-slavery in temperament, produced greater ‘Euro-
peanization’ or, more accuratcly a more
—

novel, original syncretic culture

~

than there was in places where an extremcly laissez-faire, if not merely

indifferent, Catholic hierarchy held sway.
Inevitably, the debate on African retentions has been a
highly politicized
one, for reasons Thornton summarizes: ‘Denying the survival of African
culture among Afro-Americans has constituted a denial of the Afro-American

past and possible Pan-Africanist

a
present; affirming it accepts the past and
the present’ (1992: 210). Or —
as Melville Herskovits argued at an carly
stage in the controversy
—
the old view that Afro-Americans had no historical
 AFRICAN CULTURES AND THE NEW WORLD 103

past, no African inheritance, considering might be thought ‘one of

worth
the principal supports prejudice in this country’ (1941/1958:
of race 1).
But a further dimension of politicization has also come into the picture.
Since it is often difficult, if not impossible, especially in the United States, to
identify Afro-American cultural traits as
deriving from particular African
peoples, it has become politically important for some intellectuals to

emphasize that distinctions between those peoples were essentially insignifi-

cant, so that descent from a generalized ‘Africa’ becomes more
meaningful.
This concern evidently coincides with that of people within Africa itself who
want to
emphasize clements of cultural unity or shared tradition, for their
own
quite different political motive of strengthening support for continental

political unification, Two quite different kinds of Pan-Africanism thus enter

into a marriage of convenience. Hence, in part, the appeal of ideas like
those of Cheikh Anta Diop for Afro-American cultural nationalists, which
will be traced below.
Diop’s work, however, was essentially unknown in the Americas before
the 1970s. In its absence, one English on the notion
major early influence in
of a unified African culture, or belicf system, was a highly romanticized
book by the German Africanist Janhecinz Jahn (1961). Drawing on Karl
Jaspers’s philosophy of history, Malinowski's anthropology, and Placide
Tempels's misguided construct of ‘Bantu philosophy’, Jahn posits a common
African culture based on a few
key concepts or, rather, keywords whose — —

explication, he believes, accounts for anything and everything.

On the other hand, Jahn's judgements on New World black cultures were

equally sweeping and ill-informed but this time in directions quite

—

antithetical to Afrocentric desires:

Millions of Afro-Americans in South America, the Antilles and the United

States grow up in a
European-American cnvironment and without any

knowledge of African culture. Except for the colour of their skins they are

Americans like any others. Yet the others think this colour a blemish and let
those in question feel it. Thus the Afro-American is constantly reminded of
his origin, which has otherwise often lost all meaning for him.’ (Jahn 1961:
2t)

Only white racism, then, gives any kind of significance to African origins.
This is a view with few, if any, supporters today though —
one
might suggest
that what Jahn misdescribes as a reality would be held by some commenta-

tors —
like Arthur Schlesinger (1992)
—

to be a desirable aspiration.
Several critics have suggested that it is misleading to think in terms of a

simple opposition between the survival or

disappearance of ‘Africanisms’.
As Leslie H. Owens says:

{T]he predominance of an African majority in most areas (of the New World
plantation systems) continued the pattern of African blood ties and alertness
to history that distinguished their immediate past.... The reach became
104 AFROCENTRISM

more difficult with time, but such blood ties should be labelled more than

simply lingering ‘Africanisms’, They unlock institutionally

an structured way
of ordering the world and provide a
practical link to a past that could not be
erased. (Owens 1986: 27)

Henry Louis Gates, making a similar point, tends towards the more

‘Afrocentric’ pole of the argument, though without

associating with himself
the more
sweeping claims by those
made who identify themselves as

Afrocentrists his views are

—
too heavily shaped by regard for rationality,
logic and respect for the evidence for that. And he betrays his deep
ambivalence about the evidentiary status of some of his own arguments by
entiling his own chapter on the subject, in his major work The Signifying
Monkey (Gates 1988), ‘A Myth of Origins’. Furthermore, he is far from
kind of all-determining African descent for charac-
asserting some pure or

teristic black American folkways. As he says: ‘Afro-American culture is an

African culture with a difference as
signified by the catalysts of English,
Dutch, French, Portuguese, or Spanish languages and cultures’ (ibid.: 4).
Nor is he in the business of seeking to claim that any kind of cultural

homogeneity or unity existed within the African continent, or even those

parts of it which mainly supplied the slave trade. Rather, he wants to suggest

that a syncretic Pan-African culture, such as could not have existed on the
continent itself, was created through the mixing which the Atlantic slave
trade itself produced, which ‘did serve to create a dynamic of exchange and
revision among numerous previously isolated Black African cultures a ...

truly Pan-African culture fashioned as a colorful weave of linguistic, insti-

tutional, metaphysical and formal threads’ (ibid.: 4). His particular concern
is to trace
a
genealogy for the figure of the ‘trickster’ in Afro-American
culture, which he sees as
recurring in folktales from Brazil or Haiti to the
USA, and in numerous contemporary Afro-American writings including
those of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed. He finds the
origins of this figure in the Yoruba god Esu-Elegbara, with a direct analogue
in Legba among the Fon:

these variations on Esu-Elegbara speak eloquently of an unbroken arc or

metaphysical presupposition and a pattern of figuration shared through time

and space among certain black cultures in West Africa, South America, the
Caribbean, and the United States. (6; sce also ibid.: 3-43 passem, as well as

Okpewho 1994)?

It may be noted that ancient Egypt and Ethiopia play no

part whatsoever in
Gates’s schema.
Historian V.P. Franklin argued, as
against both assimilationist and revol-
utionary interpretations of black American political trajectories, that a con-

centred the idea of selfdetermination

sistent thread of cultural resistance on

had always becn manifest, and had always also been the theme with greatest
popular appeal among Alrican-Americans. So far, the argument would have
 AFRICAN CULTURES AND THE NEW WORLD 105

evident appeal to cultural nationalists and Afrocentrists, but in Franklin's

view this was a
specifically American oppression, And he
form of resistance to

certainly did not believe that cultural values directly transposed from Africa
were at the core of it. They could not be, since the African peoples involved
in the Atlantic slave trade ‘were diverse in experiences, language, cultural

practices, and many other aspects’ (Franklin 1992a: 4). Rather, the ‘Afro-
Amcrican cultural vision was forged in the crucible of slavery’, and (here he

agrees with Cornel West, James Cone and other analyst-advocates) owed
more to Christianity than to any other source (Franklin 1992a: 204~5).
Wilson Jeremiah Moses takes noting the arguments
a similar stance,
over

African retentions in African-American religion, and secing belief in these as

an
important politically mobilizing myth, but arguing none the less that the
main roots of American black nationalism and its persistent messianic ele-
ments lie much more in North American Christian especially New England —

Puritan eschatology (Moses 1993: esp. chs 1-4). It is perhaps unsurprising,

—

in the light of the evidence, that Afrocentric writers have generally shown
little interest in African-American popular culture and folklore: even apart
from the cultural clitism which so often seems to mingle uneasily with their
intellectual populism, all too little of it supports their claims about unbroken
and all-powerful African continuities in the New World?’
Africa has been a
persistent, but decidedly a minor, theme in Afro-
American literature. A certain rather crude statistical indication of the
relative sparseness of reference to the continent in African-American poctry
is that of 381 poetry and verse selections included in the monumental Norton

Anthology of African American Literature (Gates and McKay 1997), just thirty-
three include some kind of explicit reference to Africa, these
and
only of
nine could be said to make the continent a central theme.’
Perhaps the
most famous carly example is Countee Cullen’s 1925 ‘Heritage’, which sets
up, then calls sharply into question, romantic images of an ancestral
homeland, leaving a message not of simple affirmation but of ambivalence,
doubt, distance, estrangement Langston (Gates and McKay 1997: 1311-14).
Hughes's ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ linked together ancestral ‘memories’
of the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile and the Mississippi (ibid.: 1254). The

passionate affirmation of historic African glories came perhaps most single-

mindedly from Barbadian former missionary and anticolonial campaigner
Peter Blackman:

I smelted iron in Nubia when your generations still ploughed with

hardwood
I cast in bronze im Benin when London was marshland
I built Timbuctoo and made it a
refuge for learning
When in the choirs of Oxford unlettered monks shivered unwashed.

(‘My Song is for All Men’: Breman 1973: 113)

The experimental modernist Melvin B. Tolson, in his extraordinarily dense

‘Libretto for the Republic of Liberia’, laden with scholarly allusions and
106 AFROGENTRISM

dozens of footnotes, similarly urged that ‘Alfred the Great (had) no

of Sankore’ (Gates and McKay 1337) and, amid a

plethora of
University
references to different aspects of the African past, underlined his debts to

such proto-Afrocentric works as Du Bois’s The World and Africa and the
of J.A. Rogers. Tolson awarded the ‘Order of the Star of Africa’
writing was

by the Liberian Republic for poetic tribute, though it may be doubted

this
how many of the West African state’s dignitaries actually read and got to
grips with a work which is at Icast as hermetic as
anything by Olson, Pound
or Zukofsky.
Suchexplicit and detailed invocations of the African past were, however,
exceptional. It was with the Black Power movement of the 1960s and its

literary analogue, the Black Arts movement, that something describable as

a literary Afrocentrism really became evident. Examples of African and,

more, of wider cultural nationalist invocations in the Afro-American poetry
of the era -
and to some extent subsequently —

could be multiplied, but few

of major figures of
the black literature other than Baraka made this an

Afro-Caribbean writers have been somewhat

important focus of their work.
more
prone to feature African themes major components in their
as work
than have African-American ones. Here though, it remained a
minority
too,
theme. An especially important instance, drawing far more on real knowl

edge of African cultures than most, is the epic poem The Arrwants (1973)
by Barbadian Edward Brathwaite, who had taught in Ghana for seven years.
Brathwaite is also the author of major scholarly works on Caribbean society,
including its African-descended components. In the USA, the poet Langston

Hughes was
very much in the minority with his well-informed fascination
for Africa, expressed both in extensive tours of the continent and in detailed

knowledge of emerging African literatures (Rampersad 1988: 234-40,

292-3, 347-9, 353-6, 400-66).
In the novel, the African image was considerably less frequent still, Alice
Walker has been one of the few front-rank writers to have featured African
themes and settings; Purple (1983) included
and although The
a Color
familiar romanticization sharply undercut
of Africa, in the this
more was

recent Possessing the Spirit ofJoy (1992), a harrowing story of African clitori-
dectomy and its consequences. Although other major African-American
novelists have evoked images of Africa, they have usually done so as in —

Toni Morrison’s Solomon (1977) Paule Marshall’s Prazsesongfor the

Song of or

Widow (1983) through the prism of American

-
folklore rather than with
direct reference to Africa itself —or, as with Charles Johnson's Middle Passage
(1990), the evocation has been sardonically de-romanticizing and intertex-
tual.5 Questions of nationalism, Africanism and identity politics have been,
it seems, a far more significant presence in Afro-Amcrican literary theory
and criticism than in imaginative literature itself.
the
Phillip Brian Harper’s analysis of the [960s Black Arts movement,
main creative precursor to current Afrocentric trends, lays stress on its
rhetorics of violence and anti-white feeling (Harper 1993). He suggests,
however, that these were not only largely a matter of literary posturing, but
 AFRICAN GULTURES AND THE NEW WORLD 107

(despite the loud protestations to the contrary) directed mainly towards a

white readership. The discourse was then to be ‘overheard’ by Afro-

Americans, who were to be impressed by the fierceness with which the
common foe was being addressed.® But the notion that the main target of
hostility was a white oppressor-figure was also deceptive, since the poetry's
constantly reiterated focus is on intra-racial divisions, with repeated attacks
on those blacks who supposedly aspired to white values, sold out the
revolutionary cause, and
By contrast,
so calls for black
on. pride, unity and
purposefulness empty, constantly predicated
were on the apparent assump-
tion that to make such
a call is in itself a revolutionary political act: no sense
emerges of what such feelings, once aroused, are to be mobilized for. The
violent rhetoric of Black Arts poetry is designed to ‘quell ambivalence’ ...

about identity and purpose, not in fact to call to any purposive action. It not

only stresses intra-racial divisions but ‘itself actually serves to produce such
division’ (ibid.: 254).
Related complaints have come from Afro-American critics Nathanicl
Mackey (1992, 1993) and, at
greatest length, Charles Johnson (1988), who
also ussail the extreme cultural conservatism they discern in cultural
nationalist and Afrocentric rhetoric. Mackey contrasts an
practice of
artistic

‘othering’, which is ‘to do with innovation, invention, and change’ ‘other’ -

as verb —
with a social
practice, making ‘others’ nouns, which is ‘to do with

power, exclusion and

privilege’ (1992: 51). The former, characteristic of
African-American creativity, whether in literature or in the jazz avant-garde,
has been marginalized by the ‘neotraditionalism that has taken hold of late’
(ibid.: 68) in Afro-American cultural circles. Black writers are once
again,
or still, being ‘read racially, primarily at the content level, the noun level; as

responding to racism, representing “the black experience”’ rather than as

innovators, original creators, members of ‘a counter-tradition of marronage,

divergence, flight, fugitive tilV (68). He instances as models of innovatory

artistic ‘othering’ figures like Wilson Harris (on whom he has elsewhere
written perceptively: 1993 esp. chs 10-12), Aimé Césaire, Edward Kamau
Brathwaite, and musicians Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, and Henry Threadgill
(Mackey'’s own fiction has, in an exceptional way, mingled the tropes
of the literary and of the jazz expcrimentalists). The populism and neo-
traditionalism of Afrocentric and related currents have no more room for
such experimental creators than the white cultural mainstream does: in
truth, they probably have less.
At the opposite pole to Harper’s, Johnson’s and Mackey's informed
scepticism lie those currents of literary theory and criticism which celebrate
organicist, traditionalist and supposedly African values. This sometimes
takes expression in vehement proclamations that interest in theory or

innovation is in itself Eurocentric (c.g. Joyce 1987a, b, 1991, 1994). Paul

Gilroy was surely correct to allege that in such polemics there is not only an

‘anti-political configuration” on all sides, but: “There was no

escape from
the hermeneutic claims of ethnicity and nationality, only an argument over
 108 AFROCENTRISM

involved in able walk that walk and talk

the precise ethnic recipe being to

thattalk’ (Gilroy 1992: 197).

whole discourse about American Africanisms started in
Arguably, the
and finds its expressions there. Some of the
popular culture, most potent
and debates African cultural retentions in
most vigorous complex over

the New World have related to music, especially the blues and jazz.” The
medium through which Afrocentrism has had the widest public resonance

{rom the bitter media disputes its role in schools is

perhaps, over —

apart,
—

Some have aligned themselves closely

rap music. high-profile rap groups
with various Afrocentric currents —
in very varied ways, ranging from the
aggressive reverse racism of Ice Cube to Arrested Development's idyllic
visions of African pastoralism. A smaller but still significant number
endorsed at various times the Farrakhan movement or the less powerful
rival ‘Five Per Cent Nation of Islam’ (Decker 1994; Gardell 1996: 293-301).
Among the bigger names in rap and hip-hop culture adopting such stances
have been Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Sister Souljah, Queen Latifah, Brand
Nubian and Prince Akeem. Earlier, when jazz was a more popular and
youth-orientated music than it is today in black America, jazz evocations of
Africa may have played a somewhat similar role (sce Weinstein 1992).
Editors of the journal Public Culture suggest that ‘Afrocentricity could not

have existed without (Alex Haley’s) Roots. After Roots, we can say that the
academic version of Afrocentrism already converted’ is preaching to the

(Appadurai ef al. 1994: xi), Although their short essay then proceeds to a
series of highly essentialist statements in the format of “The Black public
sphere is...', their stress on the importance of a mass-selling picce of
popular literature and its televisual adaptation, both partaking of a perhaps
uneasy, but symptomatic, hybridity between history and fiction, has some
force.
A continuity can be seen, for instance, in the images alluding to ancient

Egypt featuring on the cover art of black American performers’ album

releases throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Paui Gilroy suggests that these

‘proved to be an important means for communicating pan-African ideas in

such often
an inferential, populist manner’. Intriguingly, too, images
Egypt ‘in a way that emphasized its continuity with
presented ancient
technological and scientific achievements’ (Gilroy 1993b:
contemporary
241).
writing, meanwhile, has included a move towards ever
Gilroy's recent
of Afrocentric theories least for their unacknow-
sharper criticism not ~

ledged but intense North American parochialism. Gilroy also sees in the
transition from Exodus-based to Pharaonic narratives of identification and
a historic watershed, symbolizing a
major moral regression in some
ancestry
Afro-American circles:

Blacks today appear to identify far more readily with the glamorous pharachs
than with the abject plight of those they held in bondage. This change
betrays a
profound transformation in the moral basis of black Atlantic
 AFRICAN CULTURES AND THE NEW WORLD 109

political culture. Michael

repeated question ‘Do you remember
Jackson's the
time?’ (of the Nile has, for example, recently supplanted
Valley civilizations)
Burning Spear's dread enquiry into whether the days of slavery were being
remembered at all. (Gilroy 1993a: 207)

Appropriation of the ‘Exodus’ narrative, with its liberatory identification

with slaves escaping oppression, has now been replaced by a fixation on the

supposed glories of Pharaonic Egypt an identification, in effect, with ~

the

oppressors. Much the same, one

might add, could be said of Afrocentrism’s
desire to redirect the focus of black American historical attention from the

struggles of Africans in the New World (a story in large part of resistance

and defiance, however much may havesome
exaggerated radical scholars
and romanticized the
resisting elements in slave culture) to attend instead
to visions of precolonial African state-building (a history preoccupied
with rulers and conquerors). There is a danger in Gilroy's alternative

proposal, though, of forgetting a third participant in the ‘Exodus’ story, the

victims of the victims, the Canaanites who were dispossessed by the fleeing
Israelites: an omission with evident contemporary Middle Eastern political
resonances.®
‘It’s a Black Thing: you wouldn’t understand’, says a T-shirt slogan one
still occasionally sees on both sides of the Atlantic. That is not a view Gilroy
has much time for. There is, he insists, a wide spectrum of cultural and
intellectual expression which is very specifically black; but it is so not by
virtue of roots and inherited codes, still less of some mystic transhistorical
racial essence. The ‘ethnic absolutism’ and ‘cultural insiderism’ that sanc-

tion such claims are a constant target of his critique, especially in their latest
manifestations like the resurgent rhetorics of black macho masculinity, with
its associated familial, misogynist and homophobic tropes, and the US
Afrocentric movement."

Equally problematic are notions of unbroken ‘cultures of resistance’

extending from African roots across all diasporic black societies (see, for
Caribbean-British evocations of such ideas, B. Bryan et al. 1985; H. Gampbell
1985). In relation to similar claims made on behalf of the Rastafarian
movement, Alrick Cambridge rightly points out that their:

assumption is that the Ras Tafarian culture of resistance is a universal essence

built into the nature of the collective racial group (the subject of racial
domination), and
expressed through the group's black identity. Further,
each black personality of the collective racial group is then assumed to be a

bearer of the universal black identity, an essence transmitted across historical

times, geographical boundaries and generations. (Cambridge and Feucht-

wang 1992: 64-5)

To see modern Afro-Caribbean, African-American or black British musi-

cal culturo-religious assertions
forms, such as Rastafarianism, or features of

selfpresentation such as dress or hairstyle, as manifestations ofa continuing,

 110 AFROCENTRISM

unbroken culture of resistance is not only mistaken but mystificatory.

Rather, most of these should be understood as
particular cultural move-

ments, product of very specific circumstances

the in the recent past, which
—
in expressing opposition to dominant European-derived conceptions of
human capacities (especially Caribbean colonial and later British or Ameri-
can racist ones) manifest oppositional or counter-assertive
—

modes of self-
identification, albeit of a largely symbolic kind.
The romanticism Gilroy and Cambridge criticize, it might hardly need

stressing, has by no means always been reciprocated on the African

continent itself. There exists a whole
subgenre of travel literature by black
Americans telling of their experiences sometimes deeply painful and —

disillusioning of estrangement —
and incomprehension when exposed first-
hand to modern Africa; of finding themselves seen
by locals and, indced, ~

coming as never quite before to see themselves as first and foremost —

Americans.'!° Roots itself was quite differently received in West Africa than in
America:

official
On leaving the Gambia, I was asked by a Mandinka immigration if I
intended to return and make a film like Rools. The Gambian government
had acquired a
copy of Roots for its mobile cinema. It had not been well
reccived. ‘We don’t want to see any more dressed-up Americans pretending
to be Mandinkas. It was a ridiculous pantomime,’ the official told me.

(Haydon 1985: 12)

The enthusiasm for Rools ~

and for roots —

which helped to launch

Afrocentrism might well then seem, like much that followed, to be no more

than ‘Afro-kitsch’ when viewed from the African continent itself, Certainly
that is the harsh judgementof Mali-born film historian Manthia Diawara,
now
teaching in New York. As Diawara sneers: ‘it is nothing but a kitsch of
blackness, It is nothing but an imitation of a discourse of liberation,
Afrocentric academics fix blackness by reducing it to Egypt and kente cloths’
(Diawara 1992: 289).
Naturally, though, if one rejects any notion of evidence, of seeking
conscientiously for chains of historical causation, and opis instead for

mystical notions of transhistorical essence, no such testimony or

argument
counts. One can continue to say virtually anythingabout New World
Africanisms. Thus O.R. Dathorne could assert, in the Présence Africaine
tribute volume for Cheikh Anta Diop: ‘Rastafarianism is the current proof
of the manner in which the invisible linkage to the African ancestor

operates. Always present, confirming

yet invisible, it serves as a means of
social identity’ (Dathorne 1989: 131).
Gloria I. Joseph’s muddied tribute to the pioneer Afro-American feminist
Sojourner Truth represents a
particularly unreflective version of this
current. She asserts that Truth’s career and views can_be understood_only
from ‘within the framework of African cosmology and epistemology’ (1990:
38) -
a claim which would doubtless have bemused Truth herself. This
 AFRICAN CULTURES AND THE NEW WORLD lll

framework is described in the familiar inflated

—

and mystical —

ways: in

terms of holism,communitarianism, spirituality, and the rest. Furthermore,

it is suggested that the goals’ of the African world-view are
‘underlying
(ibid.: 43, 46); assertion which
‘perennial happiness and.peace’ an
empties
it of any determinate meaning or social, political or moral distinctiveness. It
is a not intellectual, claim. Equally ersatz-mystical, not
pseudo-cligious, an

to mention dispiriting in its elitism, is the hymning of Anita Hill (in an

otherwise rich, stimulating collection of essays on the Hill-Clarence Thomas

controversy) by Nellie Y. McKay:

(W]hen Anita Hill stepped from her plane back onto her home soil and

greeted her well-wishers, the African queens from whose loins she sprung
must have beamed on each other in great approval in the splendour of ...

her own radiance, she was an

unconquered African-American queen. (in
Morrison [ed.] 1992: 287)

As Itabari Njeri (1993: 39) caustically notes, none of those who weave

imaginings about their African ancestry ever claims descent from the village
thief. They are always ‘sprung from the loins’ (the archaic language is itself

revealing) of kings and queens.

Notes

L. For a sense of the sheer range of views on all this, see, amid a vast literature, Berry
and Blassingame (1982); Blassingame (1979); Creel (1988); Fox-Genovese (1988); Gen-
ovese (1981); V Harding (1981); Holloway (1990); L. Levine (1977); Mintz and Price
(1992): Mullin (1992); Raboteau (1978); Small (1987) Sobell (1987); Stuckey (1987); R.
Thompson (1969, 1983); Vlach (1978). Perhaps the best and most
judicious recent brief
overviews are Thornton (1992) and Kolchm (1993), esp. chs 2 and 5. For the broader
intellectual history of ideas about Africa, I have found the most stumulauing recent research
to be that of V-Y. Mudimbe (1988, 1991, 1994).
2. Once again, this would be a much stronger case m relation to Haiti, to some other

parts of the Caribbean, and to Brazil than to the USA. In the former, clear evidences of
African-derived religious systems have been traced by many scholars (Legba 1s, for
instance, one of many Yoruba and Fon gods to be found in the Haitian voudou pantheon),
whilst for the former they are far more tenuous.

3. One of the very few exceptions, Tolagbe Ogunleye, tries to get around the problem
by claiming that those (especially whites) who have studied Afro-American folklore have,
in conspiratorial fashion, played up its ‘obscene’ elements, which ‘are not representative
of the African American worldview nor our national culture’, and ignored the morally
elevating African ones (1997; 440).
4. total includes the and other vernacular included in the
This song lyrics pieces
Anthology, but not the verse sections intertwined into Jean Toomer’s novel Cane, reprinted
in full there. Naturally there are borderline cases, notably invocations of Africa or Ethiopia
as
metaphor for the African-American condition, like Frances W. Harper's ‘Ethiopia’
(Gates and McKay 1997 412), These I] have counted as ‘African’ poems: thus my rough
totals overstate, if anything, the presence of African themes in the tradition.
5. Jane Campbell (1986) has interesting reflections on the mythic uses of history in
Afro-American fiction; Berghahn (1977) 1s an earlier survey of images of Africa in this
literature up to the 1960s.
112 AFROCENTRISM

and O.R. Dathorne (1994: 111-12) has argued that

6. Similarly equally plausibly
-
~

the militant rhetoric of a Malcolm X or a Louis Farrakhan is really addressed mainly to

whites rather than to its ostensible black audience.
7. Sce, for example, (1994); Charters
Calt (1981); Finn (1986); Floyd (1995); Lipsitz
(1994); P, Oliver (1970); Small (1987); Toop (1984).
8. Sce Edward Said’s ‘Canaamte Reading’ of Michael Walzer in Said and Hitchens

(1988).
the work of Kwame that of Paul Gilroy has drawn fierce attack from
9. Like Appiah,
Afrocentrisis, many of whom seem to regard criticism by fellow black writers as
especially
akin racial treachery. Two British-based Afrocentrsts have assailed
blameworthy, to

the work of ‘Africophobist pathetic effort by a feeble-

Gilroy's Black Atlantic as an ... a

minded, traumatised and deculturalised numskull to pillorise [sz] the great

irremediably
heritage of humanity’ (Ekwe-Ekwe and Nzegwu 1994:
the Afican 19-20). They express
be of African descent
elaborate doubt over whether Gilroy, given his views, can really
(ibid.: 19), and hint heavily that his work is part of a Jewish conspiracy (22).
Eddy Harris's Nate
10, Richard Wnght’s Black Power (1954) is a pioneering imstance;
Stranger (1992) a mayor recent example.
 Part [wo

Visions of History
 10

Hamites, Semites and Statue-Stealers

A great deal of the African-American and ‘black Adantic’ polemic we have

described was motivated by reaction not only against general vilification of
Africans, but more specifically against what became known as the ‘Hamitic

hypothesis’, which gained widespread assent among European writers in the

later nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Light-
skinned peoples of ancient Egyptian, Indo-European or even ‘Aryan’ origin,
it was believed, had spread across Africa, where they generally formed a

small elite ruling over mentally and physically inferior subject races. All

significant cultural achievements could be attributed to their influence. But

as they interbred with their subjects, the racial type deteriorated and the
civilizations they had founded declined. Hence the degeneration widely
believed to have overtaken certain West African regions; as in Benin and
Yorubaland, where the artistic achievements of the could
denied, not be
but seemed hard to
square with
supposed present
past
‘savagery’ unless racial
degeneration was posited (Coombes 1994; Fagg et ai. 1982; Ben-Amos 1980).
Ancient Egypt itself was sometimes also seen as
having succumbed to this

process of degeneration.
The view that all African achievement was the product of outside
‘Hamitic’ influence was widely propagated by the noted explorer, colonial
official and author Sir Harry Johnston, and reformulated in more scholarly
terms and with pronounced Egyptocentric bias by the romantic anthropol-
ogist Grafton Elliot Smith;' but its most influential exponent was the British

ethnographer Charles G. Seligman. His Races of Africa, which continued to

be reprinted and treated in many circles as authoritative as late as 1966,

stated bluntly: ‘The civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites’

(Scligman 1930: 61). Elliot Smith thought that ‘the smallest infusion of

Negro blood immediately manifests itself in a dulling of initiative and the

“drag” on the further development of the arts of civilization’ (quoted in

Trigger 1994: 331).

The Hamitic hypothesis was very widely accepted, even unquestioned, for
a
long time: see, for instance, the surveys of its influence in Shaw (1978),
and many contributions to Robertshaw (1990). Seligman himself — ‘Sligs'’,
or

as he was apparently known to his many friends -

commanded massive

115
116 AFROCENTRISM

respect and prestige among colonial-cra British and other anthropologists,

as the star-studded contributors’ list his
/eséschrift
to underlined (Evans-
Pritchard et al. 1934). Virtually every major figure in the field paid obeisance
to his influence: from Bronislaw Malinowski to Melville Herskovits, Louis

Leakey to Marcel Audrey Richards Mauss, to George Pitt-Rivers. ‘Sligs’ was,

as Saul Dubow remarks, ‘a key intellectual broker in the world of inter-war
British anthropology’ (1995: 85-6).
In the world of French-speaking African studies, similar views were
just as

widely held; thus the pioneer archacologist Maurice Delafosse, among many
others, went in search of ancient Egyptian and other ‘white’ cultural
influences in the Ivory Coast, and of course found them in abundance.
Such ideas were still powerful in France in the 1950s, with the synthesizing
works of D.P. de Pedrals —

which were to have a

major impact on Cheikh
Anta through
Diop and, him, on modern Afrocentrism, For some reason,

fantasies Jewish origin of for various African civilizations secm to have been
French colonial historians (Holl 1990: 300).
especially popular among
German writers, too, made their contribution, which was in theoretical
the influential of all, beginning with Friedrich Ratzel in
terms perhaps most

the 1880s and culminating in the massive, highly idiosyncratic efforts of Leo
Frobenius (c.g. 1913, 1933). Frobenius, whose theorics about outside
influences on African cultures included the notion that some of these (like
the artworks of the Yoruba) came from Plato’s ‘Atlantis’ and were thus

essentially Greek, while many others were the gift of the Hamites (sec his
late, synthesizing magnum opus, 1933 passim), and whose ‘fieldwork’ methods
included outright theft of art treasures from Ife in Nigeria, was also a major
influence and has, astonishingly, continued to inspire and be
on
Diop
praised by American Afrocentrists.*
In a younger generation, even Basil Davidson, among the most passion-
ately pro-African and antiracist of all European writers on Africa, put forward
a version of the Hamitic hypothesis in his early book Old Africa Rediscovered
(Davidson 1959: 29-31) at least to the point of believing that there was an
—

identifiable racial group in Africa called Hamites; though he took pains to

the racist assumptions usually developed from that belief. And a
repudiate
substantial number of African and other black writers, as we shall see,

adopted versions of the Hamitic idea —

at least after it had becn decoupled

from the originally associated belief in a biblical ‘curse of Noah’ legitimating
slavery. Subsequently, the idea of successive waves of Hamitic invaders and
culture-carriers has been entirely abandoned by scrious scholars." Perhaps
its last gasp was in John R. Baker’s massive, anachronistic and frankly racist
1974 book Race, where the elderly anthropologist Baker still cast around
for of outdated ‘evidence’ showing that supposed African
desperately scraps
cultural achievements actually came from almost anyone other than
1974; esp. 401-17). Only among radical Afrocentrists has
‘Negroes’ (Baker
a revised version of the myth gained new life today; though some of them
also still devote considerable energy assailing the
to older Eurocentric
version, despite its moribund state (c.g. Reynolds-Marniche 1994).
 HAMITES, SEMITES AND STATUE-STEALERS 117

The Hamitic hypothesis was an especially clear-cut instance of diffusionist

beliefs among archaeologists and ancient historians. These were the conven-

tional wisdom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we

have noted, they could be appropriated for racist and colonialist ends, and
in relation to Africa they usually were; but in other contexts they could be

pressed into service by radicals. For the great Marxist archaeologist V.

Gordon Childe, diffusionism was morally appealing as a counter lo extreme

nationalist claims, especially those of interwar German historians, about the

purity and indigencity of particular cultures (cf. Trigger 1989: 254-5). In

the postwar world, however, Archaeology’ largely dispensed with
the ‘New
diffusionism, stressing instead the overwhelming influence of particular
environments on historical development, including the recognition that
similar environmental pressures could produce similar cultural or techno-

logical adaptations in widely separate places, without contact between them

(Trigger 1989 is an admirable summary of the shifting paradigms). Afro-

centrism's extreme diffusionism makes it something of an oddity or anach-
ronism in current historiography; as several critics of Martin Bernal, for
instance, have pointed out, his reliance on a strong diffusionist. model

imparts a strangely nineteenth-century air to his work (Baines 1991a;

J. Hall
1990).
There were two especially unportant. sites of contestation around claims
that any civilization in Africa must have come from outside: the highly
developed state systems of West Africa, with their widely admired artworks;
and the monumental stone structures of southern Africa, especially Great
Zimbabwe. Many Europeans simply refused to believe that the cultural
achievements they encountered in both regions could possibly be the work
of black Africans,
Early European ‘discoverers’ of Great Zimbabwe proposed a
bewildering
variety of external origins for the builders of these massive, cerily impressive
structures. The two favourite theories, proposed together or separately,
were that they had been Phoenician, and that the monuments were

connected with biblical tales of King Solomon’s goldmines and the Queen
of Sheba. The story had much earlier origins, appearing in Portuguese
travellers’ tales (based apparently on Swahili reports, not direct observation
of the sites) in the sixteenth century (Garlake 1973: 51-5). It continued to

haunt British imaginations: it and associated Hamitic themes recur through-

out Henry Rider Haggard’s numerous and formulaic African novels, m
which almost any intelligent black person
admirable or —
and especially
cach of Haggard’s various African femmesfatales is routinely —

insisted to be

light-skinned and/or of ‘non-negroid’ features.

The first excavations and chronicling of Great Zimbabwe were carried
out by J. Theodore Bent in 1891. As Garlake comments:

He approached the problem of Great Zimbabwe firmly believing, like almost

everyone else, that itsorigins must fie with a civilized and ancient people,
who must therefore necessarily have come from outside Africa. (1973: 66)
 118 AFROCENTRISM

But the objects he wrecking large parts of the site in the

uncovered —

process, and thus making the job archacologists extremely difficult

of later
~

suggested to him parallels from

as far apart as Assyria, Cyprus, Egypt,
Malta and Arabia. This mishmash of tenuous comparisons should, as later
writers have pointed out, have suggested to Bent that there was something
wrong with the whole approach, and that perhaps the unthinkable should
be thought: that the culture responsible for the buildings was indigenous.
Naturally, the notion did not strike him. Nor did such ideas trouble Richard
Nicklin Hall, whose custodianship, writing and amateurish excavations in
the 1900s further damaged the site and mythologized its history (ibid.:
71-5).
Inevitably, the later colonial regime and the white-minority state of
1965-80 sustained and promulgated belief that white, possibly Semitic,
certainly non-African incomers must have created the great stone structures

and their associated artworks. This became important

an element in white
settler ideology, while African nationalist opposition to it was
capped by
their choosing to name their own
statc-in-waiting after the ruins (sec
Garlake 1982; Frederikse 1983: 9-15). The latter's belief that Great Zim-
babwe’s creators must be indigenous, their own direct ancestors, was of
course
highly ideological rather than scholarly. But the overwhelming
also

weight of archacological evidence, as more careful and less racist research-

ers than Bent or Hall began working on it, supported their claim. Even in
the first years of this century contrary
—

to careless assumptions that

scholarship in Edwardian Britain was
monolithically aligned with the racist
Hamitic hypothesis the leading lights of archacology and ethnography
—

‘emphasized the complete lack of any alien influence at Great Zimbabwe’.

They included Sir Arthur Evans, Sir Hercules Read, Sir John Myres and
David Hogarth (Garlake 1973: 79). The genuine scholars who worked on

the ruins had no doubt that the builders were indigenous. David Randall
Maclver, following his visit in 1905, suggested a medieval date and the clear
affinities of the structures’ building techniques to known Shona practices.
More decisively, in 1929 Gertrude Caton Thompson, leading a pionceringly
all-female scientific team, demonstrated the indigencity of the builders
(Caton Thompson 1931). As Martin Hall (1995) has recently emphasized,
however, even these champions of the view that Great Zimbabwe was a

distinctively African achicvement were not free of conventional negative

stereotypes about African mentalities, with Caton Thompson claiming that
the buildings indicated ‘pre-logical’ and even ‘childish’ traits, Conversely, a
few African nationalists appropriated the idea of alien builders for their
own
purposes: in 1915 Matthew Zwimba argued that the structures showed
that Europeans had once occupied the area but had been driven out by the
locals. The experience, he implied, could and should be repeated (Ranger
1970: 22).
The edifices, it wanspired, were far more recent than had been assumed:

they were built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (most probably
mainly in the 1320s), almost two millennia after any putative Phoenician
 HAMITES, SEMITES AND STATUE-STEALERS 119

incursion. The people who built and inhabited them were without serious
doubt indigenous, directly connected to the slightly later kingdom of Mwene
Mutapa, or Munhumutapa, for which we have substantial documentary
evidence (Connah 1987: 183-213; Garlake 1973: 174-8; Beach 1980;
Mudenge 1988). The site was both a major religious centre and the heart of
an extensive system of trade: clear evidence of trade links to India and
China has been uncovered. But it was not unique, except in its size and
complexity; dozens of other significant stone structures existed in the

region, if none so dramatic as this. Regional political and trading shifts led
to its abandonment, probably in the sixteenth or fifteenth century. The
civilizational succession to which Great Zimbabwe belonged, however, was

disrupted, and its traditions largely lost, only in

were the 1830s."
But if local nationalist political thought concurred with expert opinion
on the indigenous origins of the culture Great Zimbabwe symbolizes, Pan-
African nationalist assertion pressed a quite different
elsewhere case. For
Cheikh Anta Diop, in line with his general theories (sce below, pp. 163-92),
its inspiration simply had to be
Egyptian. He pointed vaguely to the famous
carved soapstone birds of Zimbabwe, claiming that they were Egyptian
falcons, and to the image of the crocodile also found in both Egyptian and
Zimbabwean sculpture, and suggested that the area
‘may well be an

extension of the land of the Macrobian Ethiopians mentioned by Herodo-

tus’. He even linked the suffix ‘we’ in Zimbabwe and similar names to

Egyptian plural endings (Diop 1974a: 157, 172-3, 183). Meanwhile,

‘w'
fanciful theories premised on the belief that the Great Zimbabwe complex
must be of at least mainly non-African origin have not disappeared, despite
the near-universal professional consensus on its indigencity. The South
African architect and amateur archacologist Wilfrid Mallows could still be
found arguing, in 1984, that its purpose had been as a
prison and holding
centre for the Arab slave trade, designed by non-African traders, with the
local role in its construction being only that of manual labour and, later,
clumsy imitation of Arab or Indian masters (Mallows 1984).
The West African case was even more
complex, as historian Philip
Zachernuk has recently indicated. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century Nigerian writers, thinking about their past, exhibited a
range of

interacting influences which cannot be reduced to the simple polarities of

nationalist versus colonialist or assimilationist viewpoints. Some adopted the
Hamitic hypothesis to their own ends. And some, like various Afro-American
writers of the nineteenth and early twenticth centuries, even
accepted the
view that their recent ancestors had
‘degencrated’ from the higher civiliza-
tional point reached by their Egyptian or other migratory forebears (Zach-
ernuk 1994; 431-7; see also Atanda 1980: esp. 70-73).
While some uses of the
origins were anticolonialist,
myth and of external

proclaimed origin
a common Nigerian, or all West African, for
peoples all
and cultures as a rhetorical strategy for political unity, others were
highly
particularist. One of the most popular suggestions was that the Yoruba of
Western Nigeria originated from Egypt or, at least, that major features of —
120 AFROCENTRISM

their and culture

religion did so. This was
argued by the priest and
pamphleteer J. Olumide Lucas in the 1940s, and he held that it explained
the unusually progressive and intelligent character he attributed to his

people. Lucas’s work on this idiosyncratic but evidently popular theme

gained him a Doctorate of Divinity from Durham University in 1942

(Zachernuk 1994: 447).° No such tradition, it may be noted, seems carlier
to have featured among the Yoruba themselves —

though some of them, at

least after the advent of Islam in Yorubaland, origin; fancied Meccan and
their earliest and
important published historian,
most Samucl Johnson,
speculated that they might have migrated from Nubia, via the Arabian
peninsula, to their present homes (Johnson 1921: 3-7).°Johnson made no
suggestion that Yoruba language or religion derived from either Upper
Egypt or, indeed, Arabia. Heroically, the Afro-American amateur historian
Don Luke later sought to show that Yoruba religion, in its turn, must have
shaped that of the Vikings (Luke 1985: 233-5).
Increasingly in the late colonial years, and evidently reflecting the growth
of regional-ethnic antagonisms in Nigeria, amateur local historians ‘often

adopted the Hamitic Hypothesis tradition in the search for historical

primacy and cultural superiority over other Nigerian groups’ (Zachernuk

1994: 451). S.O. Biobaku claimed in 1955 that the Yoruba came from
Meroé, the ancient kingdom of the Sudan. Emmanuel Ughulu claimed

Jewish origin for the small Esan tribe. Frederick Numa believed the Urhobo
were of Egyptian descent; and so on (ibid.: 450-52). Race in the broader
sense ~
black versus white —

seemed to have little place in these polemics.

Egyptian connections ‘could be employed without having to worry whether
the Egyptians were black or white; it was the claim to a distinguished past
which mattered’ (452). But as the colonial order’s cultural preconceptions
declined in salience during the post-independence years, appropriations of
the Hamitic syndrome away dwindled too.

White supremacist versions of the Hamitic myth maintained their influ-

ence
longest, as one might expect, in South Africa, Using and misusing
evidence first from physical anthropology and then from linguistics, some
South African scholars retained faith in the Hamites right through the
apartheid era, and no doubt beyond (Dubow 1995: 20-119: esp. 74-95).
Unfortunately, the world has probably not heard the last of this discredited
idea, whether from white Africans or black Americans.

Notes

1. Smith's career exemplifies the interrelationship between arguments over humanity's

biological origins, and those over the origin of civilization: he was both a major parucipant
in controversy about the Neanderthals and the Piltdewn Man scandal, and an influential

proponent of theores on
Egyptran roots of all world cultures.
the
2. On Frobenius’s personality, career, views and influence, see
Jahn (1974); Marchand
(1997) —
neither of which sufficiently notes the sheer eccentricity of many of his ideas.
3. For overmews of current thinkmg on these issues, see Connah (1987); R. Oliver
(1991); Phillipson (1993); Shaw ef al, (1993).
 HAMITES, SEMITES AND STATUE-STEALERS 12]

4.1t had been assumed that abandonment resulted from the mfecane, the mayor
population shifts and disruptions of that era; though if more recent arguments that the
mfecane's destructiveness has been exaggerated are correct, this view may require revision.
Mudenge (1988) suggests that a combination of internal dynastic rivalries and Portuguese
micursions caused the decline of the Munhumutapa kingdom.
5, Cheikh Anta Diop several times drew on and expressed agreement with Lucas’s
theories, which so well corresponded with his own. See Diop (1974a: 184-6, 1987:
216-17). On the Yoruba Instoriographical context, see Falola (ed.) (1991).
6. Atanda (1980) notes that Muhammad Bello, Sultan of Sokoto, had recorded similar
beliefs the nmeteenth Indeed, this appears to reflect general set
mm early century. a more

of West African ideas about Meccan origins, which may have been invented —

or, less

merely revived claborated with the rapid ninetcenth-century spread of

probably, or ~

Islam in the region.

 ll

The Lure of Egypt

Ancient Egypt’s fascination for modern humanity has remained persistent,

ever-recurring.' Obsession with ies, including notably suc-
cessive, theorics
Egyptian
the
myster
Pyramids, has been a
‘meaning’ of the
imaginative on

staple of occult and

latterly of New Age thought. This bizarre tradition was

founded in 1859 by John Taylor, but reached its canonical, subsequently

ever-renewed expression in Charles Piazzi Smyth's vast mid-Victorian
labours to demonstrate that the Pyramids were the product of direct divine

guidance, storehouses of multifaccted mathematical, scientific and spiritual

(he believed, specifically Christian) knowledge.’ Piazzi Smyth also proposed
that the internal passages of the Great Pyramid represented, in symbolic
form, the entire progress of human civilization (France 1991: 185): an idea
which harked back to the Renaissance ‘art of memory’, and was expressed
in the architectural symbolism central to Masonic rites -

as we have scen,

these rites have formed an

important link between the mystic Egyptianism
of earlier centuries and the Afrocentrism of today.
Occultist and other far-fetched ancient theories
Egyptian mysteries, about
secrets of the Pyramids, and so on, seem to have a never-ending
capacity to
renew themselves: bestselling recent examples include Robert Bauval and
Adrian Gilbert's The Orion Mystery (1994) and Graham Hancock's Fingerprints
the Gods Ancient favourite location for the
of (1995). Egyptis, apparently, a

past lives of believers in reincarnation (Lowenthal 1985: 18). In the genre

fiction of horror, fantasy and the occult, from Thomas (TheMoore
Epeurean) and Edgar Allan Poe (‘Some Words with a Mummy’) through
Bram (The Jewel of Seven Stars), Théophile Gautier
Stoker (‘The Foot of the
Mummy’, of ‘One
Cleopatra's Nights’), Arthur Conan Doyle (‘Lot
No. 249”), Shane Leslie (‘As in a Glass Dimly’), and H.P. Lovecraft (‘Impris-
oned with the Pharaohs’) to Anne Rice in the present, Egypt has been
among the most favoured of all themes. Novelists outside those genres, too,
have turned their hands to the world of the Pharaohs and seen it as a

repository of lost wisdom, if rarely with very distinguished results —

from the
Abbé Terrasson’s 1731 Sethos, which in a sense started the whole thing,’ to

Norman Mailer's incredibly turgid Ancient [Evenings (1983) or adventure

writer Wilbur Smith's recent romances based around the search for ancient
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 123

Egyptian secrets, River God (1993) and Henry Rider

The Seventh Scroil (1995).
Haggard varied his South African featuring ancient
tales with several

Egyptian settings, like The World’s Desire, Moon of Israel, Morning Star, The
Ancient Allan, and Cleopatra, while the better-known (and better) Ske and

Ayesha have strong Egyptian occult themes. Less numerous but hardly less
central to the modern Western imagination have been operatic evocations,
from Mozart’s Masonic Magic Flute to Verdi's Aida and Philip Glass's
Akhnaten, In the cinema, major peaks have included The Mummy (1932),
Cecil B. deMille’s Cleopatra (1934), Howard Hawks’s extravagant epic Land
of the Pharaohs (1955), and Steven Spielberg's Razders of the Lost Ark (1981).
In art and design, Egyptian influences and pastiches have recurred time
and again (as traced in Curl 1994).
Christopher Hill notes how ‘[Uhe idea that there was a secret traditional
wisdom, Egyptian or Hermetic’ (1972: 93) runs as an often subterrancan
but always important stream through English thought, often linked to

those who ‘wanted to democratize these

politico-religious radicalism among
mysteries; to abolish mumbo-jumbo men, whether priests, lawyers, or
scholars’ (ibid.: 93; see also 196-200). E.P. Thompson emphasizes:

In London in the 1780s —

and, indeed, in Western Europe very generally —

there was
something like an
explosion of anti-rationalism,taking the forms
of ilhiminism, masonic rituals, animal magnetism, millenarian speculation,
astrology (and even a small revival in alchemy), and of mystic and Sweden-
borgian circles, (Thompson 1993: xiv—xv}

Much the same could be said of the 1980s and 1990s, and in many ways
Afrocentrism has been a explosion. In the earlier manifes-
part of that new

tation, however, ané/Egyptianism was an important thread among radicals

and believers in the democratization of mystic knowledge a current which —

Martin Bernal, among others, completely ignores. Pharaonic Egypt was

identified, by William Blake and Henry Fuseli (following earlier radicals like
William Warburton, Thomas Blackwell, and above all the republican John
Toland), as well as
by Constantin Volney in France, as the scene of

knowledge’s appropriation by a priestly clite. The priests used their monop-

olistic hold on the mysteries to enthral and delude the masses; and such

practices had passed via Moses into the Judaco-Christian world (Mee 1992:
126-9, 157~9, 195-7). Far more recently, Afro-American novelist Ishmael
Reed’s wonderfully fumnbo (1972) revives similar themes.
subversive Muabeo_
But radicals continued to look for positive messages from ancient Egypt
too. For instance, Joel Barlow’s revoludonary epic poem The Conspiracy
of Kings (1792), drew on Volney to propose a new universal ‘religion’ of
humanity based on Osirian myths (Mulford 1987); while the ‘religion
of reason’ with which the French revolutionaries temporarily dethroned
Catholicism included numerous Egyptian clements among its better-known
Greek and Roman borrowings (Notre Dame cathedral became, for a time,
the Temple of Isis). This suggests once more that enthusiasms for ancient
 194 AFROCENTRISM

Greece and for Egypt were by no means such historically antagonistic traits
as Martin Bernal and other Afrocentrists seem to assume.

Blackwell and Warburton also, it may be noted, accepted the tradition

recently rediscovered and made much of by Afrocentrists: that Pythagoras,
Socrates and Plato had received their wisdom from Egypt —

in other words,
they fully believed in what Bernal calls the ‘Ancient Model’ (Mee 1992:
128-9), even
places Blackwell
though and Warburton
Bernal among the
‘Romantic Philhellenes’ supposedly responsible for belittling Egypt (1987:
196-7, 208, 210). Enthusiasm for ancient Egypt was, however, widespread
among central Enlightenment figures too. The young Edward Gibbon’s first

projected book (which he later burned) was on the Pharaoh Sesostris

(Porter 1988: 45), He later abandoned the belicf that it might be possible
to link Egyptian, Greek and Jewish histories together a renunciation which —

a kind
he ascribed to maturer judgement, but which Bernal seems to sce as

of regression typical of the age (Bernal 1987; 185) or even, obscurely, as a

surrender to racism (Bernal 1991; 203, 273).
The particular appeal of ancient Egypt to Afro-Americans hungry for
evidence of black historical achievement is catered by to the Association for
the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC). This body, which
claimed over 800 members in 1987, sponsors conferences and Nile valicy
study tours. ASCAC’s founders and leaders were among the most extreme

Afrocentrists on the US intellectual scene:

Karenga, Ben-Jochannen, Jacob
Carruthers, John Henrik Clarke, Asa Hilliard and Leonard Jeffries the last —

serving as the bodly’s Secretary. Its 1987 mecting, held at Aswan in Upper
Egypt, was said by the organizers to attract 700 participants, most of whom
also signed up for a fifteen-day trip around Pharaonic sites, guided by Ben-
Jochannen and others. The conference title clearly indicated its intentions
of racial feel-goodism rather than scholarship: it was ‘Back to the Blackland’,

reported West Africa magazine (Anon. 1987). More recently a younger US

Afrocentrist, Anthony Browder, who runs the ‘Institute of Karmic Guidance,
Inc.’ in Washington DC, has conducted annual Egyptian study tours. In
1991, to popularize these, he published My /¢rst Trip lo Africa, ‘co-authored’
with and narrated in the words of his seven-year-old daughtcr Atlantis
(Browder 1991).
Meanwhile, what do serious scholars say on these controversial questions
of early African and Egyptian history?
What is perhaps most remarkable is how long images of a historyless
—

or,

at least, undeveloping —

Africa persisted and, conversely, how the more

popularly orientated historians of the continent felt that they had to

hammer home time after time the point that theirs was a real subject. Such
insistences, moreover, wereheavily overdetermined by the language of race:

by a notion that in establishing that there was indeed an African history,

one was
making a significant point in defence of the human dignity of
African and African-descended peoples. speak ‘To of the African past at all
—
it appeared still to be felt long after the message should have become
otiose ~
was to intervene in antiracist struggles. Thus Basil Davidson's 1984
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 125

television series ‘Africa’, a fine work of historical popularization, felt it

necessary to emphasize the point time and again: an overinsistence which

could in some eyes smack of apologetics. ‘Africa once had its own cities, its
own civilizations,’ urged Davidson (who had already been driving home this

message in his books for over thirty years) in Episode Two.

It seemed at least as necessary to underline the connections between
ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa, to insist
community on the ‘continuous
of peoples extending right across the Sahara’ (Davidson in Episode One).
Or, more dramatically, to ask: ‘What had they (the Pharaohs) to do with

Africa? How could this grand hierarchy of gods and spirits have anything in
common with the superstitious mumblings of the black peoples of inner
Africa?’ The camera then cuts to the Cairo Museum and to the ‘negroid’
and then to Cheikh Anta
features of the young King Tutankhamun Diop.
—

Here, though, Davidson (often seen as the white historian most sympathetic
a critical
to ‘Afrocentric’ viewpoints) feels that it is important to establish
distance from the Senegalese writer's ideas on the blackness of ancient

Diop as ‘one of the most outspoken’ African historians

Egypt. He describes
on such matters. Diop, centre screen, points to the cover of his own book
Parenté génétique de Uégyptien pharaonique, a
painting showing Egyptians as

‘pure’ blacks. But, says Basil Davidson, this is the only Egyptian image he
knows which makes that point so unequivocally.? Ancient Egyptians mostly
depicted themselves as
‘reddish-pink’, though some were evidently black, or
Nubian. The programme which, one
suspects, had featured
—

Diop and his

views mainly as a pious political gesture thus simultaneously affirmed —

continuitics between Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa on cultural levels, and

cast doubt on them in terms of ‘racial’ identity.
Such nervousness, such overinsistence on African historicity, even marked
~

indeed, pervaded a more

apparently scholarly project: the UNESCO
—

General History of Africa, whose multiple volumes began appearing in 1981.

The very first sentence of the first volume’s ‘General Introduction’ stated

simply: ‘Africa has a

history’ (Ki-Zerbo 1981: 1). Is it evenimaginable that a
book about any other part of the world could feel compelled to begin with
such a statement, so
plaintive or truculent in its nakedness?
In the preface to that firs. UNESCO volume, the organization's Director-
General, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, felt more exercised about the fault-lines
within the continent. He insisted on Africa as a single entity, and on
past
imperialist falsifications designed to obscure this:

lend credence the idea that

emphasis was laid on
everything likely to to a

from time immemorial, between ‘white Africa’ and

split had existed, a a

‘black Africa’.... Hermetic frontiers were drawn between the civilizations of

Ancient Egypt and Nubia and those of the peoples south of the Sahara. (Ki-
Zerbo 1981: xvii)

Ancient Egypt and its legacies are at the heart of these anxicties, as they are

at the core of the Afrocentric view of the world. We shall be seeing in

 126 AFROCENTRISM

various contexts what idcological uses have been made of the Pharaonic
state; but it is necessary to offer a brief and inevitably quite inadequate
summary of the real condition of historical knowledge about Egypt and its
external relations.
The society's dominant features were its reliance on the annual Nile
floods, its powerful kingship, and its highly unified, apparently
divine
homogeneous character. Ancient Egypt was evidently the most sophisti-
cated, as well as the largest, political state to have been created in the world

up to that time, and remained probably the largest unitary statc throughout
its 3,000-year existence. An extremely claborate structure of government,

including a huge state sector of employment and a kind of welfare system,

came into existence, and was underpinned by an equally elaborate idcology
of state power (Kemp 1989; Jansen 1978; Kitchen 1982 offer varying views
on
Egyptian state ideology). How we judge this may well depend on our
attitudes to state power in general. [t was, however, essentially if not solely ~

a
legitimating ideology.inseparable from religious beliefs about the
Pharaoh: there is no sign in Egyptian writings of clements of a critical or

analytical view of politics, such as was to be pioneered by Plato and Aristotle

~-
unless we believe that the latter drew heavily on unknown Egyptian
sources; a view held by many Afrocentrists but one for which there is no
clear evidence. There is no sign, either, that anyone even
envisaged
alternatives to the king's power. As Michael Mann says:

All politics, all power, even all morality apparently resided with him. The
crucial term Macat (or Maat), denoting all the qualities of effective govern-
ment, was the nearest the Egyptians came to a general conception of ‘the
good’. (1986: 110)

lt was a
highly stratified society, albeit one which apparently had few and
weak ‘vertical’ divisions: there is almost no by evidence of segmentation
clan, tribe
region among or the population. Slavery in the full sense seems

not to have been widespread, though there may have been more of it in the
New Kingdom than carlicr, and certainly, as in almost all pre-modern
societies, war
captives were enslaved. However, the large numbers of people
constrained to labour on the vast state building projects temples, tombs, -

pyramids, fortresses, and so on must have existed ma—

slave- or serf-like

position, although there is no evidence that this status was

necessarily
permanent or inherited, and they were paid ‘wages’ in food and other
commodities (Egypt did not have a monetary system).
The real powers of the Pharaoh must none the less have been less
extensive than official ideology proclaimed —
the nature of the sources
poses
great interpretive problems here, because the documents and
inscriptions
are alinost all statements of how successive rulers wanted might and
their
achievements to be seen. Certainly there were
long periods when regional
power figures, the nomarchs, thwarted, evaded or
challenged the authority
of the Pharaoh.
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 127

In briefest summary, one

might categorize the major Egyptian achieve-
ments which influenced the rest of the world as follows:
Pharaonic Egypt gave to the world the idea of the individual human soul,
conceived of as
surviving beyond death, and as
being judged according to

the good and ill deeds of the individual. Thus the idea that there exists a

system of cosmic justice, of rewards and punishments, can be thought of as

an
Egyptian invention: it opened the way to universalist moral principles far
more clearly than, say, ancient Jewish or Greek religious beliefs can be said
to have done. It may well be, too, that monotheism was an
Egyptian
invention —
albeitrepudiated by Egyptian society itself
one briefly —

instituted by the
Dynasty 18th
Pharaoh Akhnaten. What kind of influence,
if any, Akhnaten’s experiment had on the later evolution of Judaic mono-
theism remains highly controversial.
Often muddled and extravagant claims have been made by Afrocentric
historians about the alleged Egyptian origins of various religious doctrines.
Yosef Ben-Jochannen claims in one place that the Judaeo-Christian Ten
Commandments are taken from the Osrran Drama (Addai-Sebo and Wong
1988: 115), and in another that they come from the ‘Negative Confessions’
found in the tomb of Ramses VI (ibid. 130). Maulana Karenga says they
derive from the 125th chapter of the Book of Commg Forth by Day Gibid.: 23).
In fact, chapter or spell 125 is the same as what was once
oddly or —

oxymoronically called the —

Negative Confessions, better titled “The Declar-

ation of Innocence’ (Faulkner 1985: 29-34), and it could also loosely be
called part of an ‘Osirian drama‘. Whatever it is entitled, the connection
with the later Mosaic Commandments is tenuous: the Declaration lists
numerous sins which the speaking soul has not committed in life, and a
very
few of these sins overlap with those forbidden to Moses. That is the whole
extent of the resemblance. More generally, the inflated claims made by
Ben-Jochannen and other Afrocentrists
preternatural for and the wisdom

spiritual greatness of the Book of Coming Forth by Day seem extremely far-
fetched, The ‘book’ contains much that is incomprehensible to the modern
reader, and much that is absurd (though whether there is more of either
than there is in the sacred texts of modern world religions is a moot point).
There is a ‘Spell for preventing a man from going upside down and from
eating faeces’ (Faulkner 1985: 185-8) as well as another against cating
faeces and drinking urine (ibid.: 65); one for ‘eating bread, drinking beer,
purifying the hinder-parts, and being alive in Heliopolis’ (80); several for

repelling snakes, and one for repelling a beetle (58, 60), and so on, and
on.® Yet more implausibly, the Book of Commg Forth by Day has been claimed
as the inspiration or basis for Aristotle’s eatise On the Soud, though in fact
there is no resemblance beyond the basic subject matter: both works deal
with the idea of the soul, but one is an abstract. philosophical treatise, the
other a set of spells for the afterlife (see Lefkowitz 1996a: 8, 138-9).
In terms of philosophical thought, our assessment of Egyptian achieve-
ment must again be heavily shaped by whether we
accept or
reject
speculative claims that much Greek philosophy was in the words of —
128 AFROCENTRISM

African-American publicist George James

—

‘stolen Egyptian philosophy’. In

the absence of definite evidence for such beliefs —
some of which are

unprovable, some plausible, some evidently erroneous (for instance,James

claims (1954/92: 125-30) that Aristotle plundered the great library of
Alexandria to steal the ideas wrongly identified as his, whereas in fact the

library was founded only after his death) —

we can
judge only by the
surviving Egyptian texts themselves. These offer clements of extremely
an

complex subtle system of religious belief, some

and of which might properly
be called philosophical, especially if the stories they tell are to be interpreted
as symbolic or allegorical.” A strong case can indeed be made as it is by =

Jan Assmann for seeing this—

system of belief as evolving, under the New

Kingdom, into a fulliledged and dynamic theology, more complex than

carly Judaic monotheism (the very simplicity of the latter being a means by
which the ancient Hebrews marked themselves out as different from the

Egyptians) and pioncering the concept of the historicity of human existence

(Assmann 1995: 209, 1996).
Even this view, however, does not make Egyptian religious thought
Kwame
Appiah's judgement is that it cannot be seen as
‘philosophical’.
more than a systematized but uncritical folk philosophy, a set of beliefs

lacking in any procedures for interrogating their own status (1992: 162). In
that light, it is 2of philosophy in the modern sense, and has little of value to

tell us today. This scems accurate, though we should also bear in mind

Barry Kemp’s argument that Egyptian religion:

ina world where, in the absence of serious rivals, no one felt the
grew up
need to develop a more complete form of communication.
cogent and
Persuasion was never necessary. Although some Greck visitors
...
attempted
to record their impressions of aspects of Egyptian religion, Egyptian priests
failed to develop in time a sufficient interest in explaining their beliefs in

cogent form to outsiders, a

process which would, in itself, have led to

internal modifications. Egyptian thought cannot, therefore, be

significant
recreated as a living intellectual system. (Kemp 1989: 2)

If this is so, and if it contrasts —

as it so evidently does with —
all the ways in
which philosophy
early Greek fas remained a
living system to subsequent
it does
necessarily bespeak not an inherent superiority of Greek over
ages,
historical circumstances. Or
Egyptian thought, simply different so
Kemp
believes: | am not so sure, Because Greek
Egyptian ones, thinkers, unlike
did seek to communicate their persuade, to offer
beliefs to outsiders, to

reasons for particular beliefs, there seem to me to be good grounds for

holding Greek thought to be, if not necessarily intrinsically superior, then

certainly superior in usefulness for us. Here lics a large part of the

explanation for the Afrocentrists’ persistent failure to follow up their

proclamations of the importance of Egyptian philosophy with any specific
arguments about which Egyptian beliefs should be important to us, and why.
Moreover, one crucial clement in carly Greek thought appears to be
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 129

entirely missing from that of Egypt: a

philosophy of nature such as Greeks
from Heraclitus onwards developed, which enabled the eventual emergence
of scientific inquiry.
Did the Egyptians themselves practise ‘science’ in any clear or conven-

tional understanding of the word? This is an area where some

sweeping
very
—

indeed, wild —
claims have been made by successive generations of
speculators from Renaissance Neo-platonists to modern Afrocentists, But if
we leave aside for the moment that vast range of mystical beliefs about an

arcane ‘lost wisdom of thePyramids, and so on,

Pharaohs’, secrets of the
then we must surely Egyptians had no science
answer: No, the in ancient
the modern sense, or
anything vaguely resembling it. Certainly they had
considerable technological skills, for which their monumental architecture
presents the most impressive evidence. But this was a
highly conservative —

though not static civilization. Technological innovation

-

seems to have
been remarkably slow-paced. The failure, for many centuries, to make
significant use of iron, despite knowledge of the relevant techniques, is a
striking instance. As Basil Davidson comments:

it had required at least a thousand years for the highly evolved and in many

ways matchless civilization of

Egypt to pass from regarding iron as a curious

rarity to accepting iron technology as a necessary part of daily life. (1974: 47)

In this respect, later Sub-Saharan African cultures showed much greater

innovation and adaptability.* In Robert Palter’s view, drawing on a wide
range of authorities in the history of science, Egyptian astronomy was crude
and uninformed by any mathematical theory, clearly inferior to that of the

Babylonians, let alone the Greeks. Much the same can be said of the

Egyptians’ mathematics, while their medical practices mixed valuable prac-

tical techniques with mystical pscudo-remedies, radically different from
Greek approaches (Palter 1996a).
Clearly the Egyptians possessed claborate arithmetical and geometrical
knowledge, which enabled among other things their
—

startling architec- —

tural achievements, their ability to calculate time and create calendars, and
the complex administration of the Pharaonic state itself. But it seems to

have been a theoretical

an
empirical rather than knowledge. as Barry Kemp
comments:

it reflects the basic Egypuan mentality that problem is dealt with as a

cach

specific and individual case rather than as

application of general math-
an

ematical principles. Practised scribes must have developed a degree of

mathematical but the idea of pursuing this as an end in itself
intuition, —to
create the subject of mathematics —

did not occur to them, (Kemp 1989:

116-17; Palter [1996a: 227-41] broadly supports this view)

The breakthrough to the development of mathematical theories has always

been attributed to the Greeks, and there is little -
if any —
hard evidence to
130 AFROGENTRISM

call the attribution into question. The notion that these ‘Greek’ discoveries
were in fact taken over from the
Egyptians a -

crucial claim for much

Afrocentric thought remains —

entirely speculative.
Finally, Egypt produced, as we have noted, an extremely powerful and
long-lasting form of state. Various attempts have been made to suggest that
this had a very wide-ranging influence: the colonial anthropologist Charles
Seligman (1934) argued that divine kingship could be found throughout
Africa, and must have been diffused from Egypt. This belief was supported
also by the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, and in part by ancient historian Henri
Frankfort. As late as the 1960s some standard textbooks were still reproduc-
in Seligman’s theories
ing it, albeit stripped of the overtly racist clement (B.
Ray 1991: 184-96). The idea has been repeated, with quite different
ideological intentions, by the Afrocentric writers Cheikh Anta Diop, John
G. Jackson and Molefi Asante. Looking north from the Nile, Patricia

Springborg (1992) sees strong albeit concealed —

Egyptian influences on —

ancient Greek thinking about kingship and rule. All these claims, however,
are somewhat tenuous: the actual evidence of ideas about kingship parallel-
ing Egypt’s cither in Sub-Saharan Africa or in the Aegean is extremely thin,
influences forms
and they all ignore the environmental on
of state, although
there is good reason to think that the ecology and geography of the Nile
vallcy was the crucial influence on the nature of Egyptian kingship.
What of the influence and relations of Egypt south down the Nile valley
and west across the Sahara, rather than north over the Mediterrancan and
cast to Palestine or
Mesopotamia? A massive body of European writing, in
the last century and the earlier part of this, proposed an extreme diffusionist
model: almost everything worth noting clsewhere in Africa (or, in some

versions, everywhere in the world) had spread there from the Nile. Much
more recently, Afrocentric historians have reproduced exactly the same

view; the only real difference being that for the carlier diffusionists the
carriers of civilization were ‘white’ Egyptians, while for their modern

counterparts they were ‘black’ Egyptians, Nubians

Ethiopians. or

So -
were the
Egyptians ‘black’? and will continue
We have to noted,
trace, the intense ideological charge which dispute over ancient Egypt's
racial make-up has carried. In September 1991 Newsweek's front cover

emblazoned the question ‘Was Cleopatra Black?’.!° To serious modern

Egyptology, by contrast, the question is simply not a
meaningful or signifi-
cant one. The major contemporary overviews of Pharaonic Egyptian history
(e.g. Baines and Malek 1980; Trigger, Kemp, O’Connor and Lloyd 1983;
Kemp 1989; Grimal 1992; Spencer 1993) all raise the question of Egyptian
race or
phenotype only in passing, if at all. The most important recent work
on ancient Egyptian biological anthropology, similarly, includes only a brief
and dismissive reference to the issue, in just one of its numerous papers
(Armelagos and Mills 1993: 2). Contributors are far more interested in what
the archaeological evidence can tell us about themes like ancient Egyptian
health, medicine, diet, flora and fauna (Davies and Walker 1993). Quite
rightly, they seem to think the race question an irrelevance, or an intrusion
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 131

of inappropriate modern ideology into the study of ancient history. Where

modern Egyptologists have more fully addressed the question of the ancient

Egyptians’ racial character, they have more often than not done so while
at the artificiality of the whole issue, and arguing the that
pr
otesting downright foolish."! As two biological
question ‘were they black or white?’ is

anthropologists comment, obsession with such dubious questions has been

‘in part responsible for diverting energy and interest away from biocultural
studies within the modern ecological framework’ (Armelagos and Mills
1993: 2). The idea of calculating the presence of distinct racial ‘types’ in the
ancient Egyptian population harks back to the absurd and discredited
researches of Samuel George Morton in the 1840s: he thought he could do
it by measuring skulls (Gould 1981). Morton’s theories were a
major
formative influence on the development of American ‘scientific’ racism and
the cugenics movement and
—
these in their turn were extraordinarily
influential on Nazi race policies, as the young German historian Stefan Kuhl
has recently shown (Kuhl 1994).'* Given this sinister lineage, it is as peculiar
as it is disturbing to find arguments about the race of the Egyptians being

put forward today as

supposed contributions to antiracist politics.
There may be good reason to believe that the population became more

ethnically heterogencous over time: so much so that one recent work on

Egypt after the Pharaohs, under its Persian, Greek and Roman rulers, is
entitled (a touch modishly, if not fancifully) Lefe in a Multi-Cultural Society(J.
Johnson 1992). For most of the Pharaonic period, however, it is the quite
unusual dack of internal cultural differentiation which is most striking.
Michacl Mann puts the point more
strongly:

The degree of common cultural participation in a

single (and, naturally,
highly uncqual) society was unique. This was as close an
approximation to a
unitary social system ... as we find throughout recorded history. (Mann
1986: 113-14)

Some modern writers have

tried to assess the proportion of clearly
‘negroid’ types in the Egyptian population Eugen Strouhal
—

reckoned it at
1 to 5 per cent (1971: 1), and argues that it increased under the New

Kingdom as a result of Egyptian southward expansion. His claims, though,

are viliated by highly dubious environmental-determinist beliefs; he thinks
that ‘Negroes’ failed to survive long in Egypt because they were illadapted
to its arid climate (ibid.: 9)! Certainly various ‘alien’ population clements
entered at different times. For instance, large numbers of foreign
mercenaries
Egypt were
employed, apparently largely of Nubian and Libyan
origin.'? Many of them no doubt settled, intermarried and became Egyptian
there records of numerous ‘Sherden’ (Libyan mercenaries)
are
renting
—

agricultural land under the 20th Dynasty (Kemp 1989: 311); while there is
clear evidence of Nubian slaves, but equally of Pharaohs of Nubian origin,
under Egypt’s New Kingdom (Shinnie 1996: 82-3). There is evidence also
of substantial Greck and other immigration in the post-Pharaonic period.
132 AFROCENTRISM

No scrious contemporary scholar, however, appears to doubt that the great

bulk of thepredynastic and Pharaonic population was of indigenous African
origin (see, for example, Hoffman 1991; Rice 1991).
The African-American physical anthropologist S.O.Y. Keita has argued.
no doubt correctly, that the real issue is not the Egyptians’ race (an
inherently undecidable question, based as it is on a historically varying
ideological concept) but ‘population affinity’ to whom were the Egyptians —-

most closely related (Keita 1993: 297)? If we insist on

pursuing physical
rather than cultural traits, we should investigate the biological affinitics
between different ancient peoples rather than their shade of pigmentation;
and on this the classical texts tell us nothing (ibid.: 312).'? His provisional
conclusion is:

the Egyptians of the earlier periods, especially in the south, were physically a
of what can be called the Saharo-tropical variant range and retained this
part
major affinity even while diversifying. The base population of ‘Egypt’
included the descendants of earlier populations, and some Levantines and
Saharan immigrants. (ibid.: 305—6; see also Keita 1990, 1992)

He also points out that most European Egyptology, over a long period,
accepted that the Egyptians were a mixed but largely African population.
Only a minority view being ‘white’; even adherents
insisted on their to the

Hamitic myth saw the Egyptian

as fairly dark-skinned
‘Hamites’ (ibid.:
302-7). In other words as the evidence ~
of selfdepiction would lead us to

expect
-

this was a
people predominantly of indigenous African origin,
whose skin hues may have exhibited just, or almost, as wide a range as do
those of peoples across the contemporary ‘Saharo-tropical’ region, from
Algerian Berbers to southern Sudanese.

Perhaps the most interesting recent contribution to the debate has come
from a physical anthropology research team headed by C. Loring Brace.

They pursue the time-honoured approach of trying to assess population

affinities through analysis of skull types; but with a new sophistication and
with quite different intentions from the old craniologists or their Afrocentric

epigones. A Morton in the 1840s, or a Diop more recently, analysed a few

rather crude general features of skull type, and sought from these to

determine the race of the deceased. Brace and his collaborators have looked

systematically at a
range of two dozen micro-features (Brace et al. 1993:
4—5), and insist that language of race
the whole is an obfuscation.’” The
claims made or
implied by Bernal, Diop and others, therefore, ‘are

hopelessly simplistic, misleading, and basically wrong’ (ibid.: 22). We can

get answers to the question ‘who were the Egyptians?’ only if we discard that

language. The ancient Egyptians were neither ‘black’ nor ‘white’: they were
Egyptians, a
population of largely indigenous origins and a
high degree of
continuity across ume including, it seems
probable, continuity up to the
—

What we can meaningfully ask and to some degree answer

—
is —

present.
who they were related to. The answers Brace & Co. believe they can
give
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 133

with some confidence, based on their craniological analyses, are

striking.
The ancient Egyptian population had very few affinitics with that of Sub-
Saharan Africa: ties to other parts of North Africa, to the European Neolithic
and, more distantly, to India are more evident (ibid.: 9-12, 18-20). A
continuum of
gradually changing types can be stretching down
discerned
the Nile valley, including changes which may imply long-term adaptation to

different climates (20-21). Shomarka Keita, though evidently more sym-

pathetic to Afrocentric ideas than are Brace and his co-workers, is in broad

agreement. His cranial analyses indicate diversity, with a

range of skull types
intermediate between those found in Europe and those in Sub-Saharan
Africa, with remains from the Upper Nile showing more frequent ‘African’
features than those further north, and with evidence of increased intermin-

gling over time (Keita 1990, 1992).

It thus seems reasonable to assume, from the physical as well as other
evidence, that in Pharaonic times, as
today, the further south one went up
the Nile, the darker the inhabitants’ skins tended to be; but there is certainly
no
good reason to think that at any point along the great valley some clear

dividing line could be found betwcen lighter-skinned or ‘mixed’ Egyptians

and ‘all-black’ Nubians. Nor is there any reason to believe that the

graduations of phenotype that were encountered were

granted any kind of

ideological significance.'®
The mass of evidence from Egyptian self-portraiture, and Egyptians’
depictions of others, remains extremely hard to interpret —
as the exchange
between Diop and Davidson cited above may suggest. White supremacists
have been able to argue, with very little evidence, that where darker-skinned
or
‘negroid’ people are depicted in Egyptian art, these are invariably slaves,
captives or uncivilized foreigners bearing tribute. Even very recently one
archaeologist, Emily Vermeule, in the course of attacking Martin Bernal’s
views, seems to assume that warfare between Pharaonic Egypt and Nubia
must have reflected racial antagonisms (Vermeule 1992: 92: compare the

mythography of Chancellor Williams, discussed below). Afrocentrists have

responded, on almost equally shaky evidential grounds, by underlining the

‘negroid’ facial features in statues of this or that Pharaoh or high priest. A
particularly popular and particularly far-fetched
—
claim is that the Giza —

Sphinx’s nose was deliberately destroyed (by Napoleon, in one version) to

hide the evidence of its ‘negroid’ character."

Afrocentrists have also suggested that the reddish-brown colours most

common in Egyptian selfportraiture represent a conventionalized rather

than a realistic
image. This may well be so: certainly Egyptian art was highly
stylized. Men are usually depicted as darkerskinned than women, which
most probably reflects a conventionalized colour-coding (Yurco 1989).
Cheikh Anta Diop (1991; 68), in a far-fetched argument, links this to the

present-day use of skin-lightening creams by some West African women.

Afro-American art historian James Brunson has tried to reinforce claims

about the blackness of the Egyptians by suggesting, in another very strained
argument backed up by highly selective reproductions of Egyptian portraiture,
134 AFROCENTRISM

that where people are depicted in red or yellow colours is symbolic, but
this
when they are black, this is naturalistic (Brunson 1989)! Egyptian portrai-
ture of Nubians evidently also had a conventional or
stereotypical clement
(Torok 1991), though there is no doubt that despite the broad range of
skin hues with which both Egyptians and Nubians are depicted, the latter
are on
average darker."
But if there was some ideological reason for ancient Egyptians habitually
to depict themselves lighter-hued
as than they were, as the Afrocentric
seems to
imply, then it would suggest that there was an aversion
argument
towards darker skin in Egypt: a notion for which there is again no evidence,
and one which runs
quite counter to the Afrocentrists’ other claims (on this
see Vercoutter [1976]; Snowden [1976, 1996]). Cheikh Anta Diop sought
to short-circuit the whole Egyptians were black,
argument by saying: ‘as the
their painted iconography represent only ... could
people’ (Mokhtar black
1981: 74). Challenged by Jean Vercoutter as to why they had not used a

carbon black pigment, which they well knew, to depict themselves, but

employed a red colour instead, Diop responded, with baffling illogicality

‘that this red colour was indicative of the black Egyptian race’ (ibid.: 75).

Literary sources also provide only rather limited and ambiguous evidence
on
Egyptian phenotypes. Egyptian written texts themselves make almost no

reference to physical appearance. Later Greek and Roman ones have many
scattered allusions to the skin colour and other features of varied African

peoples, including Egyptians. Frank M. Snowden has argued repeatedly

(1970, 1983, 1989, 1996) that these distinguish fairly clearly between
different physical types, using the term ‘Ethiopian’ for those whom later
eras would call ‘Negroes’ or ‘black Africans’ and definitely not describing
Egyptians as these people in looks. It is therefore
equivalent to scriously
misleading for Martin Bernal and other Afrocentrists to use the labels

‘Egyptian’, ‘black’ and ‘African’ interchangeably, or to state or seek to imply

that ancient Egyptian phenotypes were like those of, say, contemporary
Ghanaians.
Genetic beginning to provide new evidence,
research is suggesting, for
instance, that rigid,ancaste-like earlier
separation perpetuated by close
intermarriage, including brother-sister matrimony, broke down in the post-
Pharaonic period, perhaps because Christianity imposed a taboo on such
marriages, Claims once advanced by Egyptologists like Flinders Petrie that
the biological segregation of rulers from ruled by in-group marriage
reflected a racial distinction between aristocrats and peasants, however, now

and Chiarelli 1973). Attempts to assess the

appear implausible (Brothwell
ethnic make-up of the population through DNA analysis are almost as

unlikely to give definitive answers as were older methods like skull measure-

ment and blood-group classification. They almost certainly will not answer

the question which obsesses Afrocentrists —

or at least, not in any satisfyingly

clear-cut way, for there is single gene
no governing skin colour.” Loring
Brace and his collaborators point out that skeletal analysis continues to have
one
major advantage over
genetic research, in that one can test prehistorical
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 135

or other specimens without remaining unmodified ccll tissue (Brace et al.

1993: 4). DNA analysis may, however, give some more hard information
than we now have of how much continuity there has been between ancient

Egypt's population and the inhabitants of the modern Republic. Much

Afrocentric speculation, of course, depends on undocumented assertions
that the relatively light-skinned people of the lower Nile today descend from
Arab conquerors rather than earlier residents.” We may reasonably guess
that continuing research will validate none of the simple, ideologically
charged images of ancient Egypt which dominated first European, then
Afrocentric, writing: patterns of interrelation, population movement and

mingling will appear ever more

complex as our knowledge grows.

Notes

1. For overviews, sce

Fagan (1977); France (1991); Vercoutter (1992); Wilson (1964) —

the last work gives especial attention to Americanmystical and occultist ideas about Egypt.
Saad el Din and Cromer (1991), though focused mainly on the attractions of modern
Egypt for imaginative writers, constantly notes the crucial role of ideas about the ancient
past in this appeal.
2.See Leonard Cottrell’s causuc dissection of Smyth’s reverres (1955: ch.11): ‘The
Great. Pyramidiot’. Piazzi Smyth's tdeas have remained attractive, however, to some

contemporary Afrocentrists, He is
quoted with enthusiasm, for mstance, by John G.

Jackson (1970: 100-01) amid that author's general passion for occulust ideas about
ancient Egypt; while in the younger generation of Afrocentric writing, Anthony Browder
draws, of Ins characteristic themes. Related ideas the
apparently indirectly, on
many on

monuments’ hidden wisdom have been propounded by the Nation of Islam: Gardell
(1996: 153-4).
3, Lefkowitz, (1996a, b) has claimed Sethos as the sole fountainhead of all subsequent
Afrocentric fantasy about an ‘Ancient Egyptian Mystery System’. In fact, as we have seen,

such ideas have a much more diffuse ancestry.

4.1 has been suggested that this was oddly appropriate, since allegedly the cathedral
was built on the site of what had originally, in the Roman cra, been a
temple dedicated to

Isis (Browder 1992: 190).

5, Hence its constantly recycled appeal to Afrocentrists -
for example, its use as

frontispiece to Van Seruma (ed.) (1994),

6. Assmann (1992) —-

among numerous works by the same author —

offers a far more

view of the possible relauons between

scholarly and nuanced Egyptian and
Jewishreligious
doctrines.
7. Major recent contributions nature of Egyptian religion and myth
to debate on the
miclude Assmann (1989, Perhaps the strongest
1992); Baines advocate
(1991b). of the
view that ancient Egypt did possess a full-fledged philosophical system, which fed strongly
and directly into later Sub-Saharan thought, is the African historian Théophile Obenga, a
disciple of Cheikh Anta Diop (whose work is discussed below, pp.1'79-81), Obenga, unlike
most of the Afro-American publicists who have made similar claims, at least attempts to
give an account of the content of this philosophical system (1973, 1989, 1992, 1995 passa).
A major recent African-American effort in the same direction is Carruthers (1995).
8. The fullest survey of ancient Aincan ironworking 1s now Shaw ef al (1993), which
includes eight chapters tracing its history m different parts of the continent. Sec also the
excellent brief summiary in [sichei (1997: 69-77).
9, George Joseph (1991), while he is selfconsciously revistonist and anu-Eurocentnc m

approach, gives what seems to the non-expert a balanced

picture of ancient Egyptian as
well as other African and Astan mathematical knowledges. Far more extreme claims about
136 AFROCENTRISM

Egyptian mathematical wisdom have become the common currency of some US Afrocen-
tric circles: see, for example, Lumpkin (1983a, 1994); Moore (1992b),
10. The answer would probably be no, even if one
thought it meaningful to call the
Pharaonic Egyptians black, since Cleopatra's ancestry was
mostly if not entirely
— ~
Greek.
See Lefkowitz (199G6a: 34-52) for the historical evidence, and S. Haley (1993) for an

idenutarian reflection on the emotional-symbolic issues raised by the question in one

black classicist’s mind.

11. See Yurco (1989); Kelly (1991); Snowden 1983; and, from
(1989, an otherwise

sharply opposed point of view, Keita (1990, 1993), Drake

1992, (1987) includes one of
the most detailed available discussions of Egypttan attitudes to skin colour and their

historiography, secking deliberately to balance the views of ‘vindicationist’ black writers

against more conventional scholarship, The more moderate and scholarly Afrocentrists
tend to concur with Keita, lis protégé Keith Crawford (1994), and Ivan Van Seruma
(1994b: 75), who denounces the posing of the issue im black/white terms as a
‘trap’, if not

downright racist.

12. For the early and formative influence of such ideas on South African ‘screntific’
racism, see also Bank (1996).
13, Grnmal (1992: 253, 268-9); Kemp (1989: 176, 227, 292); Save-Soderbergh (1991:
189-90). Cheikh Anta Diop, strangely, thinks of these ancient Libyans as ‘white’ (1974a:
215),
14, To cut a
complex story short, the
‘typological’ approach to studying anthropology,
prehistory and ancient the assumption that humans
history ~
based on can be divided into

fiurly clear-cut racial groups lost favour from about —

1945 onwards. It was replaced by a
‘populational’ approach, suggesting that sharp ‘racial’ divisions cannot be discerned
among human groups, only ‘clines’ or gradients of vanation, like the lines on a weather

map. This new approach was pioneered by Sherwood Washburn and Frank Livingstone
(see Livingstone 1962 for the classic expression). Afrocentrism and the ‘race science’ of a
Roger Pearson or Richard Lynn represent twin reactions against it,
15. The measurements used by the old and usually overtly racist physteal anthropol-
— —

ogists were the ‘cephalic index’ (ratio of breadth to

length of skull, for skulls of the
deceased, the term is ‘cranial index’) and ‘facial angle’ how much the face slopes —

forward from top to bottom. The standard belief was that the more steeply the face
sloped, the more primitive and stupid its owner. Contemporary physical anthropologists
focus instead on a
large number of very small variations in skull shape, deliberately
excluding those which are subject to strong environmental selective pressures, and alinost

unanimously reject the language of race.

16. Trigger (1978); Tngger ef al. (1983: 352, 361); Yurco (1989); Drake (1987); Kelly
(1991); Snowden (1983, 1996); Bard (1996), Afrocentrists are not, however, the only
contemporary scholars who contnnue to employ anachronistic and misleading terminol-
ogy: see, for imstance, Jasper Griffin's attempt to distinguish between Egyptians and
‘Nubians, who really were black’ (1996: 69).
17. See, for instance, Alexander von Wuthenau’s lament, which seems to think of the
statue as a
living person: ‘What a sad story this is. To destroy the nose of a Black woman

for some idiouc reason, the worst of which would victous racist complex’ (1987: 57).
be a

Browder (1992: 222~6) rehearses this idea at length, accompanied by a series

some of

pictures of various dates and provenances ‘proving’ that ‘Napoleon must bare [sz] some
responsibility for the damage done to Her-em-akhei. Others may try to defend him and

place the blame on the shoulders of someone else, but m the final analysis, the nose
knows.’ The Sphinx has been almost as
popular a focus for esetenc theorizing as have the
Pyramids with a recent —
Afrocentric version
volving claims that its age must be vastly

greater than is usually thought, and its builders a long-lost, pre-Pharaonic black African
civilization (sce, for example, Finch [1994: 47-51], an argument largely reliant on stories
in the magazine Condé Nast Traveller!).
18. On Egyptian depicuons both of themselves and of others, and the litte that can

reasonably be miferred from them about ethnic character or differentiation, sce also Bard
(1996); Drake (1987); Snowden (1996). It may be noted here that much discussion of
 THE LURE OF EGYPT 137

such questions has been bedevilled by stercotypical ideas drawn from Victorian physical
the physical characteristics of ‘the typical Negro’ ideas which bear
anthropology about
—

little relation to the actual diversity of African physical types. Once again, extreme
Airocentrists are often as guilty of such stereotyping as the defunct European writers they
than contemporary ‘mamstreant’
so
repetitively attack, and much more so scholarship.
19.1 am grateful to my brother, Roland Howe, a biochemist working on the technolog-
for advice the state of the art this field.
ical aspects of ‘genetic fingerprinting’. on in

and Sykes (1993) discusses the technical difficulties and analysing

Hedges im
extracting
DNA from ancient skeletal remains.
20. The major synthetic work on African populations ts firmly of the opinion that
latest
‘It was not Arabs physically displaced Egyptians. Instead,
that the Egyptians were
transformed by relatively small numbers of immigrants bringing in new ideas, which,
when dissemimated, created a wider ethnic identity’ (Newman 1995: 79).
 ——_—_—_—___—

Nubia and ‘Inner Africa’: Ideological the

Uses of African State-Building

Apart from the racial make-up of the Egyptian population itself, both
academic and political interest has centred on relations between Egypt and
the states and peoples to its immediate south —

usually labelled ‘Nubian’ -

like Napata, Meroé and Axum, which at different times ruled much of what
is now southern Egypt, the Sudanese Republic and Ethiopia.’ There are
major shortcomings, yet again, with the current state of our knowledge on
these questions. Archacological research in the Sudan, Ethiopia and neigh-
bouring regions has been vastly less extensive than that in Egypt, and has
been hamstrung by political problems both Sudan and —

Ethiopia have been

embroiled in recurrent civil war, famine and border disputes, and Sudan is
now ruled by a repressive and xenophobic Islamist regime. As Bruce Trigger
points out, so-called fundamentalist Islam discourages interest in the ancient

past, because by definition it belongs to the jahilia, the age of ignorance

before the Prophet (Trigger 1994: 345). Upper (southern) Nubia, in

particular, has been only very patchily researched, while archaeological

work was focused in the north by the massive effort to document sites facing
obliteration from the Aswan Dam project (Edwards 1989). What William
Adams said in 1977, concerning the huge contrast between our knowledge
of ancient Egypt and the vast gaps in understanding of Nubia, would be less

wholly truce today, but not much less:

Egypt, at the lower end of the Nile, has the longest recorded history in the
world, Inner Africa, at the headwaters of the same river, has almost the
shortest. Nubia, the land between, alternates for 5,000 years between history
and dark ages. (Adams 19'77: 1)

Moreover, historical
the and archaeological research which has been
done has largely by scholars
been whose training and previous work had
been as
Egyptologists. As David O’Connor (1990) points out, this may have
predisposed them to look for Egyptian influences rather than assess Nubian
cultures in their own
right or in relation to Sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, one

of the first pioneers, Karl Richard Lepsius, was a racist committed to the
that nothing he discovered in the Nile could be of ‘Negro’
dogma upper

EO
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 139

origin; while later scholars, like James Henry Breasted and George Reisner,

similarly insisted on
Egyptians as part of the ‘Great White Race’ whose
culture owed nothing to Africa. The nature of the Egyptian sources, so

much more abundant than the Nubian, also imposes problems it tends to —

reflect Pharaonic assertions about their power and superiority over the

peoples to their south, creating images of Nubian and other African states

as
poor relations to Egypt’s might, which modern European preconceptions
have only reinforced. Even scholars who saw themselves as friendly to the
Sudanese shared such assumptions (Trigger 1994: 335), while the methods
of early physical anthropology were ‘crude enough to have allowed confir-
mation of any historical theory that they wished to champion’ (ibid.; 331).
Much Upper Nubian archaeology has been site-specific rather than directed
towards long-term perspectives on social and economic change, and has
focused on monumental structures rather than remains which would give
insight into ordinary people's lives (Edwards 1989: 1-2). Partly because of
all this, we still know very litde about the patterns of early settlement in

Upper Nubia (Newman 1995: 72). Nor do we know the geographical extent,
or much about the political structures, of the successive Nubian states, nor

whether they had a continuous existence or whether there were breaks or

periods when rival dynasties contended for power (Edwards 1996: 1).
The racial identity of the Nubians themselves has been predictably
contentious. There is little doubt that they were on the whole darker than
most Egyptians. Egyptian invariably depicts them as being so: though, as
art

we have noted, this offers only ambiguous evidence, and there is a severe

paucity of known coloured Nubian artistic self-depictions, which would have

provided a
fascinating point of comparison. The most prominent and

prolific historian of Nubia, William Y. Adams, insists that Nubian ‘blackness’

is a highly variable, socially constructed category:

I have seldom referred to the Nubians as ‘black’, not out of any racial
sensitivity but because they have only intermittently been black. By that I do
not mean that their skin colour or facial features have changed significantly
in the historic period; I believe in fact that they have remained pretty much
the same since the earliest times. But race largely in the
is eye of the
beholder. ... There have
certainly been periods when they have been subject
to prejudice and oppression as a result of their dark skin colour, and when
to call them ‘black’ would be sociologically meaningful in today’s terms.

There have also been times when they were subject to the same attitudes and
treatment not because of their skin colour but because they were unlettered
barbarians, or because they were Christians surrounded by Moslems. (Adams
1977: 8)

There have even, Adams adds, been historical periods when Nubians allied
with their northern neighbours to exploit still darker-skinned peoples
further south: in such circumstances, he suggests, twentieth-century social
categorization might make them temporarily ‘white’, His view that the
140 AFROCENTRISM

actual of the area’s inhabitants has remained litle

physical appearance
changed across thousands generally supported. Peter
of years, however, is
Shinnie suggests that and
bothancient pictorial evidence
skeletal ‘show
ancient Nubians as an African people findamentally the same as modern
ones’ (1996: 13). The coming of Arab overrule ‘has had a
powerful
linguistic, religious and cultural impact but has not had a great influence .. .

on the appearance of the people’ (ibid.: 14).

Thus Adams's and Shinnie’s view of populational continuity in Nubia has
won ever wider acceptance, accompanied by abandonment of Egyptocentric
diffusionism and by emphasis on the continuity, indigeneity and environ-
mental determinants of Nubian culture ~
all this being very much in line
with the trends of thought in world archacology (Trigger 1994:
general
338-42).?
Afrocentrists, however, have often proposed the idea that the Nubian
kingdoms preceded the Pharaonic Egyptian state, and provided its teacher
and inspiration.’ No archacologist has supported this view. Bruce Williams
has, it is uc, argued that a
Pharaonic-type kingship may well have emerged
in Nubia earlier than in Egypt, and influenced the latter. But even he docs

‘origin’ for the Egyptian state: rather, he speaks

not proclaim a Nubian
cautiously of Nubian ‘participation’ in its evolution, and of Nubia having
‘helped fashion pharaonic civilization’ (Williams 1980: 21, 1987; 15). Even
in this, his is very much the minority view. As Peter Shinnic comments, the
evidence for it is slight, and it has not won widespread agreement: the

Qustul burials on which Williams builds his case

‘may well indicate powerful
chiefs, and use of royal symbols, but these may be “imported” from Egypt
(Shinnie 1996: 51; see also Adams 1985). Afrocentrists like John Henrik
Clarke predictably scorned
rather Williams for so tentatively suggesting
something that they had long since ‘known’, without evidence (Clarke 1986:
45)." Again they are reproducing the beliefs of carly-nineteenth-century
chroniclers, drawing on notions from classical authors like Diodorus of
1994: 325). But it almost
certainly not the case that
Sicily (Trigger was

urbanization, state-building or
kingship emerged first in Nubia. Evidence of

very carly human setdlement, such as stone implements, is more abundant

in Nubia than in the northern Nile valley; this, however, may indicate not

earlier habitation but, rather, that further downstream, potential sites of

tool have been washed buried deep in silt from the
primordial use away or

Nile’s millennia of annual floods (Phillipson 1993: 96-7; HLS. Smith 1991;
Krzyzaniak 1991). Around 2300 pcr (this and all other
Trigger 1976: 32~48;
dates relating to ancient Nubia are subject to much uncertainty and dispute
scholars), however, when Egypt was already a major, literate polity
among
with a
powerful monarchy and monumental stone buildings, the contem-

Nubian culture (what historians still, for lack of hard information,

porary
label the ‘C-Group’ culture) lived only in relatively small agricultural
settlements even
—

though the monumental burials at Qustul suggest to

some scholars that much of lower Nubia was united under a
single political
authority. Luxury goods were few, and seem to have been mostly of Egyptian
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 141

origin: over a third of Nubian ‘C-Group’ graves include objects of probable

Egyptian provenance (Shinnic 1996: 63-4; see also W. Adams [1977, 1984];
Trigger [1976: 49-62]; Sherif [1981]; Spencer [1993]). Intensive agricul-
ture apparently developed a little carlier in the lower Nile valley than it did
further south in about -
4100 as against 3800 BCE. (Wetterstrom 1993;
Newman 1995: 42-5). It probably did not spread either from Egypt to Nubia
or vice versa, but was brought to both by migrants from the Sahara, driven
into the Nile valley by desertification.
The earliest major urban remains identified in the Sudan, those of the
Kerma culture, are little -
if any —

earlier than 2000 Ber, over 1,000 years

later than Egypt’s (Trigger 1976: 82-102); see also Bonnet [1992]; Hassan

[1993]; O'Connor [1993a, b]; Shinnie [1996]); while Meroé’s great struc-
tures date from 1,500 years later still, The major Kerma culture, with its
monumental architecture, arose
only after the end of Egyptian occupation
from ¢1800 onwards: we still know very little of its political, cultural or

social arrangements, and can say only that the city of Kerma was
probably the
centre of an
independent Nubian state (Shinnie 1996:67-72). Thereafter,
broadly, Nubia flourished when Egypt was weak (W. Adams 1977: 141),
Only when Egyptian ‘imperialism’ in the south collapsed, in Adams's view,
did the resulting power vacuum allow the ‘meteoric’ rise of the
Napata
kingdom (ibid.: 247, 292). Human populations and some early tool-making
and agricultural techniques, therefore, may have travelled down the Nile
from Upper Egypt and/or Nubia (sec also Strouhal 1971); but urbanization,
literacy, large-scale state structures, and so on, almost certainly went mostly
the other way. One major indication of this is that all carlier written

inscriptions in the Nubian kingdoms are

Egyptian hicroglyphs. Only in
in
the later years of the last great Kushite statc, Meroé, did an indigenous -

and stillonly partly deciphered, and untranslated Meroitic script and

—

language gradually replace Egyptian.

On the other hand, the kingdoms of Kerma, Napata, Meroé and Axum
were by no means mere inferior imitators of Egyptian civilization, as

European idcologists constantly assumed. Their cultures were a

synthesis,
involving many Egyptian clements but also many not found further north.

Technologically, for instance, Meroé was in some

respects more advanced
than Egypt, including perhaps in the scale and sophistication of its ironwork-

ing: though the huge Meroitic iron industry which some archacologists
believe to have existed, on account of the slag heaps which still dot the
desert by the city, probably attained that scale only one or two hundred

years cither side of Christ’s lifetime (Phillipson 1982: 167). The Nubian
Kerma culture was literate by about 1700 Bc (Trigger ef ad 1983: 173-4).
Most strikingly of all, although the Pharaohs occupied much of Nubia

during the Middle Kingdom (c.2000-1800 scr) and again under the [8th
(¢.1500), the Kushite kingdom able to conquer Egypt itself in
Dynasty was

about 750 pcr (W. Adams 1977; 260-67; Shinnic 1996: 96-103) thereafter
Nubian Pharaohs ruled Egypt for about a century as the 25th Dynasty, which
Se

142 AFROCENTRISM

certainly suggests that the relative politico-military weight of the two was

less loaded in Egypt’s favour than historians had tended to assume.

There has been a clear —

albeit slow —
shift in scholarly perceptions of
Nubia's importance. To some
degree this has now
gone beyond the sphere
of specialist scholarship into the world of the museum and the art gallery.
Warsaw's National Museum, from 1972, was
apparently the first in the
Western world to give separate space and attention to Nubian artifacts
rather than merely annex them to those Egypt. The British Muscum
of has
more recently followed suit —
since 1991 though still within a format
~

depicting Nubia as essentially an

appendage to Egypt. The first’ major
international exhibition of Nubian art, in 1978, sought to provide a new
what indigenous from what was Egyptian-
perspectivedistinguishing was

inspired; while the massive display of African art from across the continent,
shown at London's Royal Academy in 1995-96 and New York's Guggenheim
in 1996-97, gave Nubian picces a
prominence and a
separate discussion
which would not have been likely even a decade back (Phillips 1995; Torok
1995). This has been followed, in 1997~98, by exhibition in Paris and other

European cities of a substantial sclection of materials from Sudan’s own

museums
(Wildung 1997).
Such revisions —

which, one
might confidently predict, will go further in
the near future ~

are unlikely, however, to lead widespread acceptance

to

of the view which romantic Afrocentrists would prefer: that Nubian civiliza-
tional achievements both preceded and outstripped those of Egypt. Few
experts have pressed the case for Egypt’s links with and debts to Nubia and
the remainder of Africa so far as the captions at New York's American
Museum of Natural History, whose African exhibits now (1998) carry texts

seemingly owing more to Afrocentric lobbying than scholarly consensus.

to

These claim that ancient Egypt’s ‘ideas as to cosmology, mythology and

medicine also came from the southern part of the continent’, and refer to

‘an ancient and vital interchange of ideas as well as of objects throughout

the continent’.”
William Y. Adams’s massive cffort
experi- to reconstruct Nubian historical
ence, which
quite deliberately adopts with the a stance of identification
Nubians, sees them as
developing a creative civilization, but none the less

primarily as the exploited victims of Egyptian imperialism, an ‘external

proletariat’ for the ‘overshadowing colossus to the north’? (Adams 1977;

668-9). Bruce Trigger’s work (1976) adopts a similar perspective. Indeed,
both Adams and Trigger adopt explicitly colonial images to describe Egypt's
relation to Nubia. Trigger suggested:

The Egyptians had no respect for the technology, religion, or customs of the
Nubians. Like
European colonists in Africa more recently, they dismissed the
local technology and failed to appreciate religious practices or patterns of
Kinship and reciprocity that were based on principles that were radically
different from their own. The Nubians were
portrayed by the Egyptians as
scantily clad barbarians living in thatched huts. (1976: 110)
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 143

He sees the nature of Egyptian occupation in Nubia, under the Middle

Kingdom and the 18th Dynasty, as directly colonial: the ‘native’ rulers who
were
prepared to collaborate with the Pharaohs were assimilated into

Egyptian culture, while the peasantry laboured as

Egyptians and
serfs for

Egyptianized Nubians (ibid.: 130). Adams reaches for similar

images, saying
that the oft-repeated Egyptian labe! for their southern neighbours, ‘miser-
able Kush’, ‘expresses succinctly the disdain which civilized peoples have
often felt towards their barbarian neighbours. Something of the same
attitude is conveyed in the nineteenth century term “Darkest Africa”’ (1977:
163). Elsewhere he explicitly compares Egypt's role in Nubia with modern
neo-colonialism (ibid: 669-71), and calls it the first colonial empire known
to history (Adams 1984).° Even the ‘major cultural renaissance’ of Meroé

represented an offshoot of a much wider classical civilization. In this it was

like Egypt itself in its later years, under the Ptolemies, ‘provincial expressions
ofa world civilization’ (ibid.: 295),
All this may be more than a little one-sided ~

indeed, Bruce Trigger has

not adopted so
sharp a view of Nubian inferiority to Egypt in his later

writings. David O’Connor urges, by contrast, that ‘even ancient Nubian

chicfdoms —
Ict alone states —

were larger and more

much powerful than
has been allowed for, and [that] our perspectives on the historical relation-

ships between Egypt and Nubia nced to be accordingly adjusted’ (1991:

145; the point is reiterated and developed in O’Connor 1993a, b); though
he admits that this remains a
speculative and contestable view (1991: 159).

Egyptian influence was, as one might expect, stronger in Lower than in

Upper Nubia (Edwards 1989: 139-40; see also Leclant 1981; Hakem 1981).
It seems to have diminished with time; Meroé’s material culture, form of

literacy and politico-religious heavily shaped by Egypt

practices appear less
than those of Kerma. In the Adams
post-Pharaonic era, and Trigger when -

had suggested Lower Nubia

—

was virtually deserted, it has recently been

argued that archacological evidence from Qasr Ibrim shows the continua-
tion of a vigorous culture and political authority, clearly southern in

inspiration: a
striking instance of what one scholar rather oddly calls ‘Africa
in Egypt’ (Horton 1991).
Perhaps the most concerted attempt to ‘redress the balance’, to sce

Meroitic civilization as an
independent and truly African entity rather than
a mere offshoot of Egypt’s, has been the work of Cambridge scholar David
Edwards. Bemoaning, as others have done, the ‘Egyptocentric bias’ in most
studies of Nubia, he urges instead ‘investigation of the indigenous back-
ground to the (Meroitic) state, viewed from the perspective of sub-Saharan
Africa’ (1996: 3). He devotes a degree of attention unusual among archae-

ologists to theorics of the state, especially on the work of Michael

drawing
Mann, and suggests viewing Meroé in relation to the later state systems of
the Sudanic (or Sahelian) belt, like Darfur, Kanem, Bornu, Songhai, Mali
and Ghana.’ of these, he proposes a ‘Meroitic~Sudanic
Comparing features
model’ of the state (ibid.: 21-2), with social power resting on control
of water supplies (23-6) and of manufactures (27-8), but above all of
 144 AFROCENTRISM

of
long-distance trade (28-47). The key to royal power lay in dominance
the ‘prestige-goods economy’ (39), so that ‘it may be proposed that
monopoly long-distance trade and the systems of clite alliances, forged
through the medium of locally unobtainable prestige-goods, provided a key
integrative force in the creation of a large-scale political unit such as the
Meroitic kingdom’ (47). As the tentative phraseology may suggest, Edwards
concedes that his is in large part a speculative model, offering far more
than given the paucity of evidence on Meroc’s
questions answers, severe

social, economic and political structures. Nor does he deny a major premiss
of older views about Meroé: that it was a ‘peripheral state’ in relation to the

Egyptian Empire (29). It would seem probable, though, that his perspective
of reinserling Nubia in its Airican context will be the wave of the future,
The successive states of the Sudanese region and the upper Nile, then,
were not just Egypt's poor relations, its cpigones or offshoots, But nor, most

and tutors of Afrocentrists

probably, were they the precursors Egypt, as some

assert. For Nubia, as for Libya, economic and cultural interaction with Egypt
was two-way, but with Egypt the more powerful partner through most of the
Pharaonic era. As for Ethiopia, literacy and urbanization seem to have been
there, heavily influenced by South Arabian invaders, only in the
implanted
last millennium Bor: two thousand years or more after Egypt’s flowering
(Phillipson 1993: 169-72). The first great state in the Horn of Africa, Axuin,
flourished only at the time of the Roman Empire, from the first century Cr
onwards (Munro-Hay 1991). Our knowledge of what is now Somalia in

Pharaonic times perhaps the biblical ‘Land of Punt’ is extremely scanty,

—
—

and largely derived from Egyptian sources (Kitchen 1993). Sul, the whole
project of judging Nubia’s or Ethiopia's history by comparison with Egypt's
may be a
distorting one. They were major, creative civilizations in their own

whose development deserves to be assessed its own terms. It should

right, on

hardly need adding that speculation about their inhabitants’ skin colour,
skull shapes, or DNA make-ups contributes nothing whatsoever to the task.
Yet the extreme Afrocentrists’ romantic thirst for certain racial categoriz-
ations, of the classically Victorian kind, persists. Thus Peggy Brooks-Bertram
can lament that the fragmentary skeletal remains which may
—

just possibly
—

be those of the Kushite Pharaoh Taharka have not been analysed for
‘racial designation’. This, she believes, ‘is a
very critical arca of needed
research because possibility of answering the question of the race of
of the
Kushites. Perhaps for example, with new technology, we can even recon-

struct the face of Taharka and study the bone fragments for racial clues’
(1994: 185-6). Existing technology, as we have secn, will permit no such
chimerical quest; and few people other than romantic racialists are likely to
regret that fact.
In the here, for Nubia as for Egypt, amid great gaps in our
end knowledge,
we inevitably in territory where value judgements intermingle intensely
are

with historical inquiry. It is largely a matter of which language we find more

and why. Do prefer phrascology like Martin Bernal’s refer-
appealing, we
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 145

usefully call black’ (1987: 242), that of Loring

ences to
‘pharaohs one can or

Brace and his collaborators, with their insistence that:

The ‘race’ concept did not exist in Egypt... Since it has neither biological
nor social
justification, we should strive to see that it is climinated from both
Its absence will be missed and shall
public and private usage. by no one, we

all be better off without it. R.LP. (1993: 26)

For whom is Bernal’s terminology ‘useful’? And who are Brace and

company’s ‘we'?
As one moves further south or west from the upper Nile valley, specu-
lation and uncertainty become ever
greater
—
but the claims of first the
Eurocentic, later the Afrocentric, diffusionists, become ever more grandi-
ose. It is simply ahistorical to argue or assume that the character of Sub-
Saharan African kingdoms was, or could have been, similar in all essentials
to that of ancient Egypt. To do so is to ignore not only the sheer variety of
African state systems, but also the massive influence of environment on

political forms. The nature of the Egyptian state was in significant part
dictated by its location: the long, thin cylinder of the Nile valley where a

high population density could be sustained in the areas reached by the

river's floodwaters, but beyond whose limits lay almost uninhabitable desert.
Few, if any, other African states, at any stage in history, had such clearly
fixed natural boundaries as did Egypt. Arguably, those physical limitations
were a
major factor inducing strong, claborate state structures. Without
them, peopie would escape the demands of the state by migration, and
awareness of this kept the machinery of control at a
relatively low level. The
Pharaonic state maintaining the irrigation system derived
rested on from
the waters of the Nile,
on
extracting and redistributing the surplus
and

produce and labour freed from agriculture, It benefited from superb

internal communications along the Nilc itself, and from the fact that neither
essential metals nor substantial wood supplies cxisted within the country.
Access to these, therefore, depended on foreign trade or war, and could
thus be cffective royal monopolies. No subsequent Sub-Saharan state had
such a basis. In many cases, African state power rested on control over
long-
distance trade, which was important but not fundamental in the Egyptian
case. None depended on
large-scale public works, and apparently none was

mainly reliant on taxation of agricultural producers.

Furthermore, very many of the larger Sub-Saharan states relied on

substantial standing armies the most famous

—

examples being the Zulu and

other military states of southern Africa in the eighteenth and nmeteenth
centuries. Ancient Egypt appears to have had only a minimal standing army,
at least under the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Slavery, too as opposed to —

enforced but waged labour on state building projects seems to have been —

it was crucial to the social

relatively unimportant to
Egyptian life, whereas
structure of many later Sub-Saharan states. It is simply not true that most or

even many African state systems conceived of their monarchs as divine (as
146 AFROCENTRISM

opposed to sacred), as did the Egyptians. On the contrary, a very wide

variety of elective, limited or
quasi-constitutional monarchies existed across

the continent: most typically, systems where the king’s power was checked
by an
assembly of chiefs or elders. Federal systems of city-states, as among
the Yoruba, are also not rare. None of these has anything much in common
with Egyptian kingship. In case after case, research on
precolonial African
states has shown that they embodied mixtures and competing forms of
authority, with rival legitimating ideologics. Power was never cither unitary
or uncontested (see, for a sample of such accounts, Feierman 1974; Joseph
Miller 1980; Vansina 1978). Moreover, Africa is well known to have had

many highly decentralized formally polities, without constituted or inherited

political authority: though questionably, called ‘statcless’
these are often,
societies. They are quite literally at the opposite extreme from ancient Egypt
in the spectrum of world history's political forms.
Scholars remain largely in the dark about the extent and nature of
influences from ancient Egypt to the rest of Africa, and vice versa. The
image proposed by William Adams (1977) of Nubia as the ‘corridor’ of -

culture contact between Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa has not been —

followed up by much substantial knowledge about what actually passed

along the corridor. Indeed, another specialist, J.A. Alexander, has argued
that the upper Nile was not a corridor but a cul-de-sac, with very litle
evidence of cultural transmission cither way (1988). John Tliffe, similarly,
thinks that ‘Egypt was remarkably unsuccessful in transmitting its culture to

the rest of the continent’ (1995: 26)."5 Graham Connah’s careful overview
takes this side too. He can find ‘very little influence’ from either Nubia or

Egypt on the rest of Africa: ‘Surely corridors usually lead to a few rooms,
but the Nubian corridor, in which so much happened, docs not scem to

have led anywhere’ (1987: 65), In 1967 Peter L. Shinnie pointed out that
not a single object of certain Meroitic origin had been found west of the
Nile and south of the Sahara (Shinnie 1967: 167); and this is apparcutly still
true today.
In one
sphere where there is substantial evidence of trading or other
contacts -

in the large number of cultivated plants found both in Egypt and

in Sub-Saharan regions the —

evidence suggests that ansmission was almost

entirely from south to north. Only much later, with the medieval growth of
trans-Saharan trade routes, did agricultural goods move from North Africa
to the south (Blench 1991). In general, it would appear that trans-Saharan
trade was on a
very small scale between the birth of the Pharaonic state and
the introduction of the camel in the early centuries of the Christian era

(Connah 1987: 97-9). Much earlier, though, prior to desertification, when

north-central Africa was still fertile -

and, indeed, large parts of it were

covered with great lakes —

the story may have been very different. Only
scanty archaeological evidence so far fills out John Sutton’s pathbreaking
suggestion, made over twenty years ago, of an
‘aquatic’ civilization flourish-

ing from as far back as 9000 BcE until 2000 BCE in the midst of what is now

the Sahara, before it dried up (Sutton 1974). The likelihood seems to be

 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 147

that the first pastoral and agricultural inhabitants of the Nile valley migrated
into it from the Sahara around 5000~—4500 pcr (Hoffman 1991; Wetterstrom
1993). Some of the answers to our
questions about Egypt’s relations with
Sub-Saharan cultures may lie here, with the almost wholly unexcavated
relics of those who hunted, fished and grazed their animals where now

there is only sand and rock. In many ways, then, the issue remains open, as

Peter Garlake comments:

Philology has so skewed our

understanding of that (Egyptian) civilisation
that, until the archaeology of settlements is fully addressed, Egypt’s place in
African history and the influences that permeated to and from the far

interior will remain in the realm of polemic. (1995a: 31)

More fundamentally still, there is little -

if any -

basis, across most of

Africa, for the idea ~
fundamental mythography
to that the
Afrocentric —

continent’s historically known societies originated in massive, long-distance

population movements out of the Nile valley. In the very distant, prehistoric
past, it seems
probable that human settlement across Africa as, eventually, ~

across the whole of the rest of the globe resulted from two successive
—

in East Africa: of australopithecines

migrations out of an original ‘cradle’
three million years ago, and of early humans perhaps 200,000 years back.
Right at the other end of human history, the present locations of major
ethnic groups in southern Africa are the end-product of very modern
(eightcenth-century) and often violent population shifts consequent on

white colonial incursions and Zulu expansion. These became the basis for a
racial mythology of their own, with apartheid apologists using them to assert

either that South Africa’s black peoples are just as much ‘immigrants’ as
whites are, or that the original homes of the main ethnic groups were, by
remarkable coincidence, the small and impoverished enclaves assigned to

them under the Bantustan system. But the belief proposed in Cheikh Anta

Diop’s theories and heavily stressed in those of Afrocentric ideologues like

Chancellor Williams, Yosef Ben-Jochannen and Molefi Asante is nothing to
do with either the prehistoric or the most recent migrations. It is that vast
population movements took place in historical times. All African societies,
they assert, owe their fundamental unity to their founders’ having spread at
some ill-defined point at the birth ~
of Pharaonic Egypt, at its collapse, and/
or in the era of Arab conquest from —
some equally ill-defined northeastern

region of origin: Egypt itself, ‘Nubia’, or ‘Ethiopia’.

This belief is quite without evidential support. It is ue that many African
like those elsewhere in the world, harbour myths of origin tracing
peoples,
their ancestry to places other than those they now inhabit. But across much
of eastern, central and western Africa, the overwhelming weight of modern
and other evidence in many that for
archacological, linguistic suggests cases

thousands of years the ancestors of modern peoples inhabited roughly the

descendants. A of
regions still held by their modern complex pattern
there has certainly been, but where have clear evidence for
migration we
148 AFROCENTRISM

it, much of it has been migration within regions of Africa, not right across
the continent. Modern archacologists have litte doubt that agriculture
and early technologies had several different points of origin in Africa
rather than diffusing from one
single starting place (Andah 1993; Muzzolini
1993). Where there are
strong reasons to think that most modern inhabi-
tants descend from long-distance migrants, the probable patterns do not

fit the Diopian schema at all: as in the rainforests of equatorial Africa,

whose main inhabitants spread there by a very gradual process
between 5,000 present
and
2,000 years ago (Vansina 1990: 49-57), or with Bantu

speakers.
The original cradle of the Bantu language group, spoken virtually right
across the southern half of the continent, most
probably lies in what is now

southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon (Vansina 1990: 49; Phillipson 1993:

198-205; Newman 1995: 140-49): certainly not in the Nile valley. According
to an alternative language classification
means of referring to greater time
depth, the two main groupings, the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, spread
respectively from the Niger valley and the southern Sahara (Blench 1993:
136). The spread of a language group docs not necessarily mean the

physical migration of entire peoples, displacing previous inhabitants

—

though almost undoubtedly, migrants speaking variants of the Eastern

Bantu linguistic subfamily moved cast and south (not west, as claims about

Egyptian or Nubian origins would suggest), usurping the territories of

Pygmies, Khoi and San. Even the myths of origin (themselves, one may
suppose, frequently of recent origin) are often fairly localized ones, with

peoples as diverse as the Masai, the Kikuyu, the Asante and the Igbo
identifying their legendary birthplaces as within a few hundred miles at

most of their present dwellings. As an Igbo elder insisted to historian

Elizabeth Isichei in 1972: ‘We did not come from anywhere and anyone
who tells you we came from anywhere is a liar. Write it down’ (Isichei 1976:
3).
Similarly, the notion that eighth-century Arab conquests
the produced
massive destruction and disruption an idea also crucial
—

to the theories of
Chancellor Williams, Molefi Asante and other American Afrocentrists —
is

simply not supported by the evidence. In parts of the Maghreb, it is true,

historians have argued that pre-Islamic social structure
sometimes and

agrarian life
profoundly
were disordered by the Arab conquests: not so

much the initial coming of Arab overrule, which probably involved only
minimal population movements, as
by the eleventh-century spread of
nomadic peoples, and especially the Banu Hilal westward from Egypt. But
as Albert Hourani sums up the current state of knowledge:

has shown that the this...

Modern research ...

process was not so simple as

.
It may have been the weakening of authority and the decline of trade, and
therefore of demand, which made it possible for the pastoralists to
expand,
No doubt their expansion caused destruction and disorder, but it does not

that the Banu Hilal were hostile to settled life as such; they were on
appear
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 149

good terms with other dynasties. If there was a shift in the rural balance at

this time, it may have resulted from other causes, and it seems to have been
neither universal nor
perpetual. The expansion ... of pastoralism, in so far
as it existed, was
possibly therefore an effect rather than the main cause of
the breakdown in the rural symbiosis. (Hourani 1991: 104)

Morcover, the expansion of the Banu Hilal and other Arab tribes, like the
initial Arab conquests, docs not seem sufficiently large
to have involved
numbers to transform the make-up of the Maghreb’s population. The
spread of the Arabic language and Arab culture was mostly the result of
Berbers and other indigenous Maghrebian peoples assimilating to the
culture of the conquerors, rather than a wholesale
replacement of one set
of inhabitants by another. The whole idea of massive Arab migrations into
and across North Africa may well even have been largely the invention of
early Islamic historians, especially Ibn Khaldun (see also Hasan 1967;
Newman 1995: 77-83). The apparent medieval decline of North Africa
almost certainly owed far more to the ravages of the Black Death than to

Arab conquest and forced population movements (Dols 1977; Iliffe 1995
47-9). And
finally, there is no evidence at all that the disruptions which did
ensuc had major impact further
a south, beyond the Sahara. The whole
structure of explanation proposed by those historical mythographers who
believe in a
cataclysmic flight of African peoples from Egypt or Nubia across
the whole continent, fleeing an Arab holocaust, rests on nothing.
A further major theme in Afrocentric historical fantasy should also be
noted: the tendency to deny, against all the evidence, that chattel slavery
existed in precolonial Africa or to msist that, if it did, it was
~
a
marginal,
small-scale and benign phenomenon. One might set against this romantici-
zation Orlando Patterson’s
estimates of the scale of precolonial African
slavery, in the fullest
comparative global study of slavery ever attempted.
Patterson suggests that in the major early states of West Africa Islamic —

Ghana, Mali, Segou and Songhay slaves constituted over 30 per cent
—
of
the population. In the states of the central Sudan and the Hausa city-states,
it was between 30 and 50 per cent. In the Fulani kingdoms established after
the jihad of the eighteenth century, between 30 and 66 per cent of the
people were enslaved; while in the states of what are now
Senegal, Gambia,
Sierra Leone and Ghana, figures ranged from 30 to 75 per cent. Among the
precolonial Yoruba, from a third to a half of the population existed in
servile status, while in many of the states of Central Africa -

among the
Kongo, Luvale and Lozi, for instance —

the figure was over 50 per cent

(Patterson 1982: 354-6).

Internal African
slavery and slave-trading were undoubtedly on a very
significant scale, and
long predated the advent of European slave-raiding;
though i remains quite possible indeed, likely that their growth was— —

greatly stimulated by the effects of European demand, so that African slavery

in its later, most extensive and many of its harshest forms can reasonably be
‘blamed’ in part on Europe. One estimate (P. Manning 1990: 171) has it
150 AFROCENTRISM

that the number of people enslaved within Africa, across the sweep of
modern history, equalled the number exported by the Aviantic and Red Sea
trades. Important aspects of intra-African economic interchange, like trans-

Saharan trade routes, included or were even

pioneered by the trade in
human beings (Savage 1992). Nor is it true that slavery within Africa was

largely ‘domestic’ and therefore, by implication, relatively benign: large-

scale plantation slave-labour systems were introduced in several parts of the
continent, albeit probably most often under at least indirect European or

Arab influence (see, for example, Cooper 1977, Sheriff 1987; Lovejoy 1983:
31-2, 164-7, 190-209, 223-7).
The nature and extent of precolonial formal education in Africa has also
been the site of extravagant assertions by Afrocentrists. Journalist. Lynell
George describes a
history class in an Afrocentric private school in Los

Angeles:

Brother Reginald begins with a beautiful vision of the past. Not full of slave

ships, sharecropping, and whips and chains, but of grand Egyptian kingdoms
and universities (like the Grand Lodge of Luxor at Kemit or the University
of Sankore Timbuktu)
at filled with vast libraries and peopled by unheralded
thinkers. (George 1992; 95)

In reality we know almost nothing of the educational system at Luxor: nota

‘university’ but some kind of seminary for Egyptian priests. The ‘university’
of Timbuktu, or Sankore (the latter was actually the name of a mosquc), is,
however, near the heart of romantic Afrocentrism. Chancellor Williams
(1971/1987) presents a
quite fanciful account of this ‘university’, together
with the claim that there must have been a lost, but once
comprehensive,
‘West African elementary secondary school systemand without which there
could not have been a University of Sankore with such high standards for
admission’ (ibid.: 206). Ahmad Babo (as Williams calls him, though ‘Ahmed
Baba’ would be more accurate) ~
few of whose works have survived, and
who may well in any case have been a Berber rather than a ‘black’ West
African —

is suggested to have been the sixteenth-century world’s greatest

scholar (207-8).'' Quite apart from its fantasy element, Williams's account

is caught in an awful dilemma: he cannot deny that education at Timbuktu

was Arabic and Islamic, but he wants somehow to combine glorification of
this centre for African scholarship with his overarching schema of belicf
that the Arabs and Muslims systematically destroyed African civilization

throughout the continent.

Cheikh Anta Diop, as usual, is more points out rational in his claims. He
that the state of learning in medieval equivalent Timbuktu may have been
to that in Paris at the same time, but he not pretend that it certainly does
was clearly superior. He notes how its overwhelmingly Koranic emphasis
might hamper the development of secular and scientific inquiry. And he
emphasizes that in both cases, in Africa and in Europe, the Arabs were
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA‘ 151

intermediary for the introduction —

or reintroduction —
of classical scholar-

ship in the Middle Ages (Diop 1987: 176-95; 1991: 325-6),

It seems pretty certain that Timbuktu was not a ‘university’ in anything
like a modern sense, but rather —

like al-Azhar in Cairo, or indeed like

medieval Oxford and Paris -

a centre where various individual religious

teachers passed on sacred knowledge to private pupils.'’* Little has survived
of the writings produced by its scholars though the remnants
—
include two

of the most important early written sources for the region’s history, the
sixteenth-century Tarikh el Fattach and Tarikh el Sudan but quite clearly —

their learning was overwhelmingly in Islamic tradition and jurisprudence.

Afrocentric writers who ignore this, and scek by omission to evoke in their
readers’ minds images of something equivalent to a twentieth-century
university, are engaging in more or less deliberate, even
deceptive,
anachronism.
The obsession with Timbuktu, like so much else in contemporary
Afrocentrism, reproduces nineteenth-century and earlier European fan-
tasies. The idea that the city was a vast, fabulously wealthy conurbation in
the heart of the desert haunted European imaginations and inspired a series
of ill-fated expeditions in search of it, across many decades. When Euro-

peans did eventually reach Timbuktu in the 1820s, they found the reality
(of a rather decayed, largely mud-built, modest-sized town) thoroughly
anticlimactic —

though the carlier beliefs have an afterlife in continued

proverbial uses of the town’s name as
figure for the distant and mysterious."
Timbuktu's significance may also have been exaggerated even
among more

sober historians, because our

surviving written sources for the history of its

region come overwhelmingly from the ulama of the city itself (Gomez
1990)."" The Islamic scholars of
were undoubtedly a learned
Timbuktu

religious community, but their apparentuy did not extend beyond

influence
West Africa. There is no clear evidence that they were treated as
equals, or
even referred to, by the Islamic jurists of longer-established centres like al-
Azhar. Even within the region, for political reasons, under the Songhai

Empire the scholars of Gao, although less erudite than those of Timbuktu,
had greater influence (ibid.: 22). Timbuktu's eminence was relatively short-
when scholars forced flee after Sunni
lived, dissipating many of its were to

Ali Ber’s conquest in the carly 1470s (ibid.: 8).

But Timbuktu was also a
major trading centre, including the slave trade.
Even during the nineteenth century, it has been estimated that 1,000-2,000
slaves were
exported every year northward from the city across the Sahara

(Lovejoy 1983: 150). One of the city’s most renowned scholars and
of Chancellor
mythography, Ahmed Baba Williams’s
centrepiece
(1556-1627), wrote a book fiercely condemning the enslavement of fellow

normality in relation to infidels: ‘the

Muslims, but
reason
acceptingits legality and
for slavery is non-belief.... Whoever is captured in a condition of
non-belief, it is legal to own him, he may be’ (quoted in Lovejoy whosoever
1983: 30).
Timbuktu was, it is clear, the most
important but far from the only West
a waNS AFROCENTRISM

African of Muslim
centre scholarship. There was evidently considerable
learning literacy, mostly of Islamic
and inspiration, in precolonial West
Africa. To that extent, standard European stereotypes of an illiterate Africa
must indeed be qualified quite substantially. Large parts of Sub-Saharan
Africa, especially in the savannah belt and the eastern coastal regions, had
written languages quite independent of European influence: literacy was
mainly in Arabic, but later in such African languages as Hausa and Swahili
as well, Alex Haley's depiction, in Roots, of his hero Kunta Kinte coming
from an educated, book-owning household before his enslavement may be
romantic, but it is by no means ridiculous (Haley 1976). But equally
evidently, much of this learning was, in the post-medieval world, a kind of
museum piece. In the 1820s Sultan Bello of Sokoto, on meeting Hugh
Clapperton apparently the first European he had seen
—
and learning that -

he was a Christian, asked him whether he was a Nestorian or a Socinian

(Perham 1960: 33)! Clapperton gave the Sultan a
copy of Euclid in Arabic,
for which he was extremely grateful, saying that his family had previously
had a
copy obtained in Mecca, but it had been lost in a house fire (Davidson
1964: 68). What the medieval spread of Islamic scholarship in Africa really
indicates, on a world-historical perspective, is how extensive the reach of
Islamic learning was compared with the far more modest attainments at the
time of Western thought. As Marshall Hodgson says: ‘Occidental culture
was confined to its own little peninsulas. Thomas Aquinas was read from

Spain to Hungary and from Sicily to Norway. Ibn al-Arabi was read from
Spain to Sumatra and from the Swahili coast to Kazan on the Volga’ (1993:
132). But that recognition of the intellectual power and influence of
medieval Islamic culture is no
part of Afrocentrism’s intentions at all,
The use of sources m Afrocentric historical writing has becn as question-
able as the narrative such writing constructs. By far the most tmportant
to Greece
classical source for the Afrecentric view of Egypt and its relations
has been Herodotus, whose account of information he gleaned during
travels in Egypt has long supplanted an carlicr reliance on the scanty biblical
references to Africans. Herodotus’s own allusions to skin colour or other
racial features are in fact equally scanty, which might well be thought
evidence of just how irrelevant such matters were in the Mediterrancan
world of his time —-

a view, suggesting that Antiquity was effectively free from

colour prejudice, which has been extensively argued by Afro-American
historian Frank Snowden (1970, 1976, 1983). Those few references in
Herodotus —

really only two, and both

oblique have been -—

repeated,
mantra-like, time afier time by modern-day polemicists obsessed with the

Egyptians’ phenotypes.
This illustrates one facet of the uses of Herodotus: an uncritical enthusi-
asm for him as a source of supposed hard facts, which ties in with the whole
of historical often
retrieval racial retrieval. This has been the
enterprise as

lonely, selGtaught, obsessional activity until recently, almost entirely -

outside the academy of people like Yosef Ben-Jochannen or John Henrik

—

Clarke, But coexisting with this is another aspect of Herodotus’s appeal, less
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 153

clearly acknowledged but evidently often operating in the very same writers
as the first. Herodotus is the great father of mathologos, the mingling myth of
and history, of an anti-rationalist discourse: antithesis to the slightly later

Thucydides, the founder of a rationalist historical tradition. He is also the

great urexponent of
history as éstorm, finding out for yourself, mixing
discovery with subjective experience, affect maybe -

even, in the slogan of

Molefi Asante: ‘soul as method’.”
lt is arguable, however, that Herodotus’s ideas about non-Greck cultures
should not be seen mainly as a result of investigation, accurate or otherwise,
and assessed for their truth or
Hartog has sought
falsity. Rather ~
as Francois
to show through an extensive depiction of the
discussion of Herodotus'’s
Scythians the ideas
—

expressed may be mostly symbolic ones. The Scythians

function m Herodotus’s writing so
Hartog argues, and despite the Greek
—

historian’s repeated insistence that he bases his account on

personal
observation as symbolic
—

barbarians, not-Grecks, inverting Greek values,

embodying the opposite of everything Greek; especially in their nomadism,
contrasted with the Greeks’ rootedness.'® Elsewhere, Hartog has suggested
that Egypt also served primarily definitional, stercotypical functions for
Greek thought (Hartog 1986).
The abuse of sources such as Herodotus is not, however, the most serious
fault of Afrocentrism as
history. The unanimist, diffusionist model of African

history proposed by Diop and by modern American Afrocentrists, ironically

enough, results in a disparagement of African cultural creativity just as
thoroughgoing as that imposed by the Hamitic myth and other long-
discarded European misconceptions. H, as they tend to believe, cultures,
institutions and ideas across the whole continent are
merely copies of
originals developed in ancient Egypt, then Africans have created nothing
new for four thousand years quite evidently a ridiculous
or more: as well as
a
demeaning view. It also involves
a kind of state-worship, celebrating the
power of rulers, conquest and military might as evidences of glorious
African achievement and blind to the oppressions which precolonial African
rulers, like state powerholders everywhere, visited on their subjects. Succes-
sive generations of Africa’s historians have identified themselves with the
rulers: precolonial chroniclers who were, more often than not, court

officials; imperial apologists lauding the ‘civilizing mission’ of the colonial

state; histortans of the early post-independence years cheering on the new
rulers’ efforts at ‘nation-building’ and ‘development’. Contemporary Afro-
centric ideologues merely repeat the pattern, the only real difference being
that they, more than their predecessors, seck their heroes in the past rather
than the present, in mythicized warrior kings and queens of bygone ages: a
Shaka, an Nzinga, a Mutota. Our knowledge of ancient African civilization
remains extremely incomplete. As Graham Connah aptly puts it, we have ‘a
series of islands of information projecting from a sca of uncertainty and

ignorance’ (1987: 214). But that is no reason to fill the gaps between the
islands with fantasy.
154 AFROCENTRISM

Notes

1. Uses of the term ‘Nubia’ have been rather vague and shifting, referring sometimes
to the whole of what is now the Sudanese Republic, southern Egypt and even parts of

Ethiopia, sometimes to the much smaller area where the Nubian language 1s spoken
today.
2. The texts accompanying Nubian exhibits at the British Museum, recently updated,
are
muriguing here in their very reucence. ‘The ancient Nubrans’, visitors are told ‘shared
a broadly common background with the Egyptrans,
ethnic but their physical characteristics
showed variations of skin colour, phystognymy, and skeletal proportions.’ Another caption,
however, points outs how clearly Egyptian portraiture disunguished Nubians from
themselves.
3. For example, Diop (1991: 103-8): an argument resung on a
single artifact from a

Nubian artifact which, it evident, as well overinter-

grave; an seems
Diop misinterprets as

prets; see
also J. Jackson (1970: chs 2-3), Anthony Browder (1992: ch.1); Brunson (1991);
or, in far wilder and less coherent fashion, Ben-Jochannen (1972: passim).
4. Drake (1987): 163-4, 312-13), again, seeks to mediate between these viewpoints.
5. This is at best speculative, and in its reference
objects quite unsupported to matertal
by archacological evidence. Other texts exhibited at the museum are yet more question-
able. They claim that there was no ‘real’ slavery in precolonial Africa: 1t was ‘in fact,
serfdom, a more humane institution and primarily a way of dealing sensibly (!) with war
captives and criminals.... Even after Arab and European slave traders mtroduced real
slavery (1), many African rulers at first treated ther slaves with respect.’ Elsewhere it 1s

suggested, peculiarly, that ‘there is probably a greater knowledge of the Yoruba religion,
for instance, in Harlem than in Nigeria’,
6. Such language 1s also reflected in the Briush Museum, which boldly heads one

section of its exhibits “Egyptian Impertalism in Africa’ It is not clear why such labels are
thought more appropriate for this relationship than for other conquests of one polity by
another m the ancient world, unless for the questionable reason that it is still thought of
as a dominauon by ‘whites’ over ‘blacks’,
7.On these states, see also McIntosh and McIntosh (1984, [993); O’Fahey and
Spaulding (1974); Levizion (1973, 1985); Abdullahi Smith (1976); Hunwick (1985).
8.The problem with such a formulation is only its mtentionality: the apparent
presumpuon that Egypt ued or should have tned ~
to
spread its influence south
—
and
west. As John Baines comments, Egypuian culture was ‘highly interconnected and inward-

looking in its organization and style... many Egyptian cultural traits did not travel well’
(1996: 33-4). In relation to its size and power, Egypt scems for most of its history to have
been unusually lacking in expansionist ambitions (ibid.: 43-4).
9. See Connah (1987); Oliver (1991); Phillipson (1993); Isichei (1997); and contribu-
tions to Robertshaw (1990); Shaw ef al. (1993) for summaries of the evidence.
10. Vansina (1995), surveying linguistics, stresses
recent that
evidence from historical
there was no
single massive Bantu ‘migration’, “expansion’ or ‘explosion’, but a very long,
slow, uneven set of processes involving successive dispersals of individual languages. Isichet
(1997; 46-55) 1s a clear summary of the state of historical knowledge on these and related
Issucs.

a detailed
11. For though in large part necessarily speculative
—

study of Baba, see —

Zouber (1977), The romantic and grossly exaggerated view of Timbuktu’s intellectual
significance is reflected in exhibit capuons at the American Museum of Natural History,
where it is wrongly asserted that it ‘became a center of learnmg so famed that scholars
came from all over the Islamic worid to discourse together and to consult its
priccless
library’.
12. See Saad (1983); Gomez (1990), Hiskett (1984) and Levizion (1973) give the wider
context; and for a superb evocation of this educational model in a situation where it
continued into the present, in Iran, see Mottahedeh (1985).
13. Gardner (1968) gives a vivid account of the legends and the eventual European
 NUBIA AND ‘INNER AFRICA’ 155

penetrations to the city. Gardner’s epigraph, taken from Thackeray, neatly evokes the
mysterious appeal of Timbuktu to both European adventurers and later Afrocentric
romantics:

In Africa of the world)

(a quarter
Men’s skms
black, their hair is crisp and curled;
are

And somewhere there, unknown to

public view,
A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo,

14, Though see Hunwick (1996) for contrary arguments, offering reasons to believe
that Timbuktu’s religious scholars were more autonomous from the Songhar state, or

more
powerful vis-d-ws it, than Gomez suggests.
15. For balanced overviews of Herodotus’s merits and faults in the framework of both
classical and modern historiography, see
Momigliano (1990); Lateiner (1989). After
Herodotus, the other ancient author most often cited by Afrocentrists is Diodorus of
Sicily, who wrote almost 400 years later. Diodorus, who apparently visited Egypt in 60-56
BCE, makes wide claims about Egyptian influences on Greek learning, derived from tales
told to him by Egyptian priests. There are
good reasons for scepticism about most of his
assertions, as Mary Lefkowitz (1996a: 57~61, 71-80), Lawrence Tritle (1996), and other
classical scholars explain,
16. Hartog (1988). Edith Hall’s (1989) study of images of the ‘barbarian’ in Greek
drama offers a rather similar message in less Parisran-theoretic ways; while Liverani (1990)
gives a wider understanding of the ideological uses of ancient historical texts.
 13:

African Unity and African Philosophy

of the underpinnings of Afrocentric

Many philosophical contemporary
beliefs can be traced, ironically enough, to a handful of colonial-cra
African views of the world. The first and most
European writings on

influential of these was La Philosophie bantoue (translated as Tempels 1959),

which in 1945. The author, Father Placide Tempels, was a
appeared
Franciscan missionary living in the then Belgian Congo, now the Democratic
of Congo. He believed that the peoples of the Bantu language
Republic
(which includes most of west, central and southern Africa) shared a
group
common
philosophy centred on a
concept of vital force. Everything in the
universe possesses this force, including inanimate objects, but it is most
and in human beings: still active in the departed
powerful important
ancestors as well as the living. Humanity, ‘Muntu’, is thus at the centre of
the universe, the measure of all things, at the head of a hierarchy of beings
but intimately connected with all by the flow of energy between individuals,
between the living and the dead, the human, the animal, vegetable and
Preservation of this cosmic order is the yardstick for ethics: evil is
inorganic.
that which disrupts it or diminishes the flow of vital forces, good that which
and enhances. All people had some
knowledge of these forces
preserves
and a
responsibility to act so as to
preserve them; but greater knowledge
and more active of intervention in the circulation of energy were
powers
the exclusive domain of magicians, those whom Europeans misnamed
witchdoctors.
This basic system of beliefs, according to ‘Tempels, was shared by all the
of the and diverse Bantu language family though his
peoples huge
—

many
own research had embraced only one of these, the Baluba. Moreover, it was

shared and understood by all individuals within cach of these societies; even

those whose Western education expected to have

or lifestyles might be
made them abandon it. All ‘Bantu’ behaviour was to be explained in terms
of the system, including what appeared to outsiders to be illogical or

unreasonable behaviour for the system iself,

—

though internally coherent,

was (in the word the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had popular-
ized to describe African beliefs) ‘prelogical’.
Tempels’s motivation was as one might expect —

specifically Christian —

156
 AFRICAN UNITY AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY 157

and, many would add, also specifically colonialist. He believed that by

understanding the ‘Bantu’ world-view his fellow whites in Africa, especially
missionaries (for the book was clearly aimed at them rather than Africans,
who must presumably —

by Tempels's own
arguments
—

already ‘know’ its

contents), would be able to build on the elements it had in common with

Christianity, illogical and ‘magical’ residucs,

purge it of its and so lead the
natives towards a morally perfect life. Despite this, his ideas
more civilized,
had a strong
appeal to many African intellectuals. Tempels was, after all,
insisting that Africans possessed a coherent philosophical system rather than
just a mass of superstitions. For this, his African fans were prepared to
forgive or overlook much, including his rather low opinion of the content
of that system. Those African thinkers attracted to Tempels also ignored, or
misunderstood, his opinion that while the Bantu had a philosophy in the
sense of an organized system of beliefs, it was not a ‘true’ philosophy
the Western tradition, in that they were not critical, self-
comparable to

aware beliefs.
There were further attractions. Bantu thought, as
Tempels described it,
was outside the ‘logocentrism’ (or emphasis on the speaking, knowing,
rational individual) which first Heidegger and the existentialists, later
Derrida and the deconstructionists, saw as the defining feature —

indeed,
since they were hostile to it, the original sin of Western -

philosophy. Thus
for people swayed by existentialist ideas, who naturally included many
Francophone African students, the Bantu as described by Tempels were

natural soul mates. For those influenced by négritude, too, the emphasis on

intuition and affect rather than logic which Tempels attributed to Bantu

thought was attractive, because it chimed with their own convictions. And
the suggestion that the same structure of thought was shared by all members
of all African socictics, across a very large part of the continent, was

pleasingly parallel to the Rousseauian claims about a unified

general will
opposed to colonialism, in which nationalist politicians traded.
After Bantu Philosophy, the second European-authored work to have an

important impact in such circles was Dieu d'eau, entretiens avec

Ogotemmeli
(translated as Griaule 1965) in 1948, by the French anthropologist Marcel
Griaule. The book was based on Griaule’s interviews with a blind elder of
the Dogon people in the then still French-ruled Mali. The old man

explained to Griaule an elaborate Dogon cosmogony, philosophical system,

and set of religious beliefs. Like the system Tempels discerned among the
Baluba, the Dogon world-view centred on a
single all-pervading principle: '
‘Nommo’, which meant simultaneously the Word, creative power, water,
and the divine twins whose creation had set the world in motion. Also like

Tempcels’s Bantu system, these Dogon beliefs were handed down supposedly
unchanged from the distant past, and were held unanimously by all Dogon
-

or so Griaule implied. Critics responded that this was an

impossibly
idealized and undynamic picture of ‘tradition’, one which might well
not so much the shared ideas of the Dogon as the personal
represent
interpretations of the individuals Ogotemmeli and/or Griaule. As Kenyan
158 AFROCENTRISM

philosopher D.A. Masolo put it, it was a ‘mixture of dogonized Griaule and

griaulized Dogon’ (Masolo 1994: 69}. More recent anthropological field-

work suggests that Dogon in general do not share —

indeed, disclaim —
much
of the knowledge and beliefs attributed by Graiule/Ogotemmeli
to them
(Van Beck 1991). It was even
suggested that Ogotemmeli might have been
deliberately hoodwinking Griaule, especially in relation to the strikingly
advanced knowledge of astronomy attributed to Dogon tradition (see below,
pp. 269-70).
Griaule’s findings were appealing to many African intellectuals, especially
those influenced by Senghorian négritude or by existentialism, for the same
reasons as were Tempels’s, and with the important addition that significant

parallels could be discerned between Dogon beliefs as

presented by Griaule
and ancient Egyptian religion. Soon African philosophers began to apply
and develop their ideas, the first important figure to do so being the
Rwandan Alexis Kagame in the early 1950s. Perhaps inevitably, Kagame and
those who thought like him were more concerned to emphasize the
rationality of African belief systems than was Tempels: Kagame was particu-
larly insistent on tracing similarities between Bantu philosophy and that of
ancient Greece (see Masolo 1994: 84-102). Shortly thereafter, John S. Mbiti
elaborated a view of traditional African religious thought, stressing its
coherence and sophistication, its congruence in important respects with
Christian belief, its association with a distinctive, non-linear conception of
time, and once again the alleged great similarities of belief systems across a

large part of the continent (Mbiti 1969).

In this way what was dubbed ethnophilosophy was born, and Tempels,
Griaule, Kagame and Mbiti have remained its most influential exponents,
though they have many followers.* As we shall sec, the main ideas also

migrated across the Atlantic and had a major impact among Afro-American
thinkers. But it soon came under sharp attack from African philosophers
themselves.
The central focus for assault was the
ethnophilosophy uncritical attitude
maintained towards the ideas it examined. cthnophi- At its worst and lowest,
josophy amounted to little if anything more —

than collecting the proverbs —

and folktales of a people and presenting them as if they were a

philosophical
system. Such collection may (so the critics conceded) have antiquarian or
curiosity value, but to see its limitations as a form of knowledge, one has
conduct scrious discussion in such a form:
only to imagine trying to any

Dr A: Are you going to vote for the Government, or do you think we need a

change?
Professor B: Well, look before you leap, as my mother always said.
A; Aye, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
B: Still, a bird in the hand 1s worth two in the bush.
A: Maybe, but a
change good is as as a feast.

non-philosophical bystander. How about the idea of

[interjection from a a

coalition? |
 AFRICAN UNITY AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY 159

B: Mmm... they say many hands make light work.

A: But too many cooks spoil the broth,
B: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
A; Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
B: There'll be a cuckoo in the nest, mark my words.
A: Or in the
a dog manger.
B: It’s no use
crying over spilt milk.
A;
That’sjust sour
grapes.

At this point, in the cultural model apparently preferred by some advocates

of ethnophiiosophy and Afrocentrism, Professor B concedes the argument
because she recalls that Dr A is older than her, or because he is male, or

because he has mentioned grapes, whose proverbial sexual connotations

make them an unfit subject for mixed company.
Ethnophilosophy is based on beliefs that in every ‘culture’ there is a

system of metaphysics, largely unchanging over time, generally if not

unanimously shared among the members of the in question,

community
and unique to that community. This is a
highly questionable assumption, as
critics like Paulin Hountondji, Marcien Towa and Kwasi Wiredu have
it is indeed, they have said, unfounded and even absurd
pointed out: an

one. Adding to the absurdity is the widespread claim that a

single such

metaphysical system exists across the whole African continent; and that (as
some ethnophilosophers soon began to add) it derives in all its essentials
from ancient Egypt, which itself drew it all from unspecified parts of
some

the continent further south, and in its turn provided all the major
intellectual resources for Greek —
and thus for European thought. —

Hountondji, a Marxist philosopher from Benin who had studied under

Louis Althusser in Paris, labelled this basic error of ethnophilosophy
‘unanimism’. Hountondji, and many others, pointed out that the belief

systems of African peoples were

vastly more varied than the ethnophiloso-
phers asserted, and often incompatible with one another. To assume,

furthermore, that all members of a particular society ~

rich and poor, male
and female, rural and urban, and so on —
share the same beliefs is to

subscribe to a
myth about a
singular ‘African mind’ of the very kind shared

by colonialist discourse and conservative forms of nationalism alike. Houn-

is thus sharply critical of the whole ethnophilosophical project. In his
tondji
view, from its analytical flaws, it is a form of sentimental
quite apart
exoticism panders to European prejudices about
which inferior African

rationality (Hountondji 1983).

Moreover and this was a point the Ghanaian
—

philosopher Kwasi Wiredu

made with force there is great value in merely describing
particular no -

traditional beliefs, whether or not they are labelled ‘philosophy’ and even if
(unlike many of the ethnophilosophers) one describes them accurately. To
do so is neither a serious contribution to philosophical knowledge nor of
relevance to the practical tasks facing modern Africa. Any philosophy worth
the name, in Wiredu’s opinion, must involve properly critical and logical
 160 AFROCENTRISM

methods; and these methods are not culture-specific but universal (Wiredu
1979, 1980, 1992). Using such tools, one must analyse criftcally and, where
appropriate, develop such insights as may be contained in ‘traditional’
African. beliefs. Doing this is not abandonment of one’s own cultural
traditions but creative use of them, part of a task of development in which
all the world’s involved. Nof to do it, Wiredu insists, is to
peoples are

in the inherent authoritarianism of ‘traditional’ oral cultures

acquiesce
where the ideas of the long-dead, by the elderly and the
interpreted
powerful, exercise tyranny over theliving. The Cameroonian
minds of the
Marcien Towa, making a similar point in a more openly politicized, Marxian
manner, charges that ethnophilosophy and négritude, with their hostility to
innovation, science and technology, entail servitude to an unholy alliance
of colonial or neo-colonial exploiters and local African powerholders (sce
Masolo 1994; 164-78; Bjornson 1991: 202-5).
The critique of ethnophilosophy has more recently been pressed further
by the Kenyan D.A, Masolo (1994), the Zairois Valentin Mudimbe (1988,
1991, 1994), and the Ghanaian Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992). Masolo
an overview rather than a
polemical intervention; but there is no
attempts
doubt where his sympathies lic. His judgements on the post-Tempels
ethnophilosophical currents are
scathing; he correctly shows how vastly
superior in rigour and pertinence have been the ‘Eurocentric’ analytical
approaches, whether primarily influenced by Anglophone linguistic or
pragmatist. traditions or
by Marxist and other more evidently politicized
approaches. And he is simply scornful of American Afrocentrism., Mudimbe,
engaged in even wider-ranging analyses of conceptions of Africa, drawing
on
theological (especially in Mudimbe 1991) and ethnographic as well as
philosophical literatures, and adopting a framework heavily influenced by
Michel Foucault, is less evidently part: pres; but he, too, concludes with harsh

judgements on the ethnophilosophical tradition as ‘a type of convenience

history’ (1988: 192) and ‘primitivist strategies’ (ibid.: 195).

After Hountondji, Towa and Wiredu, the most powerful attack on

ethnophilosophy and associated assumptions has been made by the philos-

opher Kwame Anthony Appiah. His polymathic and polemical book /n My
Father's House (Appiah 1992) has become probably the most widely read
work in the field. He echoes and extends the criticisms made by Wiredu
and others. As Appiah points out, the mere of a belicf
description system
without any critical assessment can have no more than curiosity value:

{UJ might, | suppose, lead to intellectual tolerance, but it might just as casily
lead to chauvinism or total incomprehension: ‘So they believe all that; so

what? They're wrong, aren’t they?’ (ibid.: 151)

But, he says, the ethnophilosophers never

go beyond this descriptive stage.
They stop just where serious thought must start.

Such assault on the views of Tempels, Kagame and their followers m

Africa in the North American context shall see in detail later

implies as we
—
 AFRICAN UNITY AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY 161

on
equally sharp rejection of the founding assumptions of the Afrocentr-
~

ists, who have launched predictable counterattacks. Victor O. Okafor, for

instance, charges that Appiah’s In My Father's House ‘plays into the hands of
those who need a
legitimation of the Eurocentric view of Africa’ (Okafor
1993; 210). It is striking, however, that such critiques appear not to engage
with the content of arguments like those of Mudimbe, Wiredu, Hountondji
or
Appiah at all. They merely repeat the supposed need, on usually unstated
political or psychological grounds, to retain belief in a distinctive, continent-
wide and unanimously held African and African-diasporic world-view. - ~

Nor do they note the fact potentially embarrassing to them —

that their —

hero Cheikh Anta Diop agreed at least in part with the critics of ethnophil-
osophy, urging that the systems of thought described by such writers as
Tempels and Kagame ‘cannot be considered to be a
philosophy in the
classical sense’ (Diop 1991: 323). Beyond that, what underpins this insist-
ence seems to be a notion that a belief or an idea found in Africa, however
trivial, incoherent significance merely because
false,
or it is African. is of
Such a notion with varying degrees of impatient scorn,
is dismissed, by
thinkers like Wiredu, Hountondji, Mudimbe, Appiah, Towa and Masolo.
For many people in North America, by contrast, haunted by a pressure of
racism and its legacies far more direct
that experienced by the
than
intellectuals of independent Africa, it remains
emotionally compelling.
It is
dangerous for someone largely without formal philosophical training,
and without knowledge of many of the languages whose special features are

important to these debates. to venture overall judgement on them. However,

such a
non-specialist can attempt to evaluate the formal features of the

contending arguments: the standards of logic, coherence, lucidity, amount

of evidence deployed, and so on. In these respects it seems to me that there
is simply no contest. The critics of ethnophilosophy Hountondji, Appiah, —

Wiredu, Towa, Masolo, and the rest seem to me to adhere to generally —

higher standards of argument than their opponents. Their views are

expressed in more lucid form (with the partial exception of the Althusserian

jargon disfiguring Hountondji’s early work!), they proceed more often by

reasoned argument as
opposed to mere assertion or
description, their work
is more coherent. To some, no doubt, that view simply shows that I have an

irredeemably Eurocentric conception of coherence.

Notes

1. Kwame Appiah’s saure hits the point exactly:

Soon to be published: THING. Western Culnare and the African World, a work which
exposes the philosophy of ING, written so
clearly on the face of the English language.
For ING, m the inner
Euro-American dynamic essence view, is the
of the world. In the

very structure of the

making and meaning,
terms the English (and thus, by
doug and
extension, all westerners) express their deep commitment to this conception Here
we see the fundamental explanation for the extraordinary neophilia of western culture,
us sense that reality is change.’ (1992/3: 13-14)
162 AFROCENTRISM

detail Griaule, with a

postmodern-
9. Clifford (1988; 55-91) gives some biographical on

dissolve about the accuracy of its

istinterpretation of his work which seeks to questions
contingent truth specific to
findings by viewing it as ‘a complex, negotiated, historically
certain relations of textual production’ (60).
of the key texts, Masolo (1994) is an
3. Serequeberham (1991) reproduces some
in Bodunrin (1984) and Gyckye
excellent overview and critique, as are the briefer surveys
between their
(1987). Some recent phases in the debates, mcluding convergence
cultural be traced in the various
and those of postcolomal theory, can
preoccupations
contributions to Eze (ed.) (1997).
 14

Cheikh Anta Diop

By far the most important single figure in the development of what is now

called Afrocentric thought is the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop.

Indeed, one
might say that every significant idea or claim put forward by
Afrocentrists today was carlier expressed by him (though as we have seen,

many of them also have a much older, more diffuse ancestry). The only real

exceptions to this are the wilder, more mystical and more racially exclusivist
assertions made by extreme Afrocentrists. These Diop did anticipate;
not

for although his work involves many unsustainable claims, his primarily
was

a career of rational inquiry. Not only did his

intellectual writings precede
those currently high-profile US Afrocentrists,
of the they are in almost every
respect superior.
Very few academics can ever have had popular record albums named in
their honour. It is an index of Cheikh Anta Diop’s reputation, especially
posthumously, that the leading Senegalese group Super Diamono titled one
of their best-known LPs with his name. Diop was born in Senegal in 1923
and died there, relatively young, of a heart attack in 1986. His background
was that of an aristocratic Wolof family: later acquaintances often remarked
on his patrician manner and bearing, and elements of social and ethnic
disdain seem to creep into the way certain Senegalese ethnic groups or

‘castes’ are described in his writings.’

His early education was Islamic, but he achieved a
scholarship to the
Sorbonne in Paris, initially to study mathematics. There, his interests seem

to have diversified remarkably, involving both a specialism in nuclear physics

and growing enthusiasm
a for Egyptology. His historical writing was to face

widespread opposition
—

not only for the idiosyncratic and adventurous

nature of the theses he advanced, but for the fact that these came from
someone not conventionally trained in the relevant disciplines. He believed
there were more sinister reasons for hostility —
in taking up Egyptology, he
was
approaching hidden secrets: ‘I noticed that whenever a Black showed
the slightest interest in things Egyptian, Whites would actually begin to

tremble’ (Moore interview 1989: 372). He remained in France from 1946 to

1960, receiving his MA and doctorate from Paris, though the latter was

awarded only after considerable controversy and initial rejection. He also

163
164 AFROCENTRISM

taught at Paris high schools, and participated in the activities of the Présence

Africaine group. From 1961 until his death he headed the radiocarbon
laboratory at LFAN (the Fundamental [originally the French] Institute of
Black Africa) at Dakar University. In 1981, belatedly, his historical work was

given institutional recognition when he was appointed Professor of Egyptol-

Dakar. This did his champions, like
ogy and Prehistory at not prevent
obituarist Babacar Sall in West Africa, from alleging that the University
and failed to him through the years. Sall described Diop
neglected support
as ‘an intellectual liberator fighting against the falsification of history,

against academic charlatanism. Ali his life he did this work in a terrible
solitude’ (Sall 1986: 1162). Ironically, the University itself was renamed in

Diop’s honour after his death.

Alongside his academic career, Diop pursued an intense but decreasingly

successfulpolitical involvement. He was a founder of the Rassemblement

Démocratique Africaine in Paris, and its student organization’s Secretary-

General from 1950-1953. Returning to Dakar, he established the Bloc des
Masses Sénégalaises in opposition to Senghor’s government, but this foun-
dered as many members accepted offers to join the ruling party. Diop held
firm against such blandishments, but soon thereafter a
one-party state was

effectively proclaimed, and his efforts to found new

opposition partics —
first
the Front National du Sénégal, then the Rassemblement National Démocra-

tique —

met with official bars, Still, in Senegal’s relatively mild version of

authoritarianism, Diop and his supporters remained able to voice open
dissent throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Gradually, from the mid 1970s
onwards, Senegal moved back towards a
multi-party system, but with few
benefits for Diop's RND, which won
just one seat in the 1983 clections.
The major intellectual influences Diop acknowledged were interestingly
diverse. In his early Paris days, Aimé Césaire was
evidently the greatest
formative presence, both personally and through his writings (Moore
interview 1989: 408-5). More broadly, Diop stressed the ancient Greek
Stoic materialists Democritus,
—

Epicurus, Lucretius together with Marx

—

and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Plekhanov, Hegel, Goethe, Alfred de Vigny,
the historian of Antiquity Fustel de Coulanges, and Albert Einstein (Diop
quoted in Gray 1989: 122). The views on ancient history in Diop (1987) are
heavily indeed, excessively reliant on the now thoroughly outdated
— —
work
of de Coulanges. The presence of the Greeks is intriguing in a list of

inspirations drawn up by someone so

strongly associated with the claims of

Egypt’s priority over Greece. Interesting in a different way is the enyphasis

on a Marxism of a strongly orthodox Soviet cast, including Stalin himself.
Doubtless this reflects the Parisian leftist intellectual milieu of Diop’s youth.
He was to continue a close if sometimes somewhat timelagged engagement
with French and Marxist thought despite his Afrocentrism: his last major
book, for instance, includes substantial critical discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre
and of French Marxist anthropology (Diop 1991: 185-207, 223-4).
Diop’s ideas were evidently formed carly in his career, and changed little
thereafter. In lectures and articles in 1950 and 1952, he was already
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 165

proposing his main themes: the character of ancient Egypt as a black African
civilization, the continuity of its cultural influences across the continent and
across the centuries, the culturo-historical unity of Africa. His first book,
Nateons négres et culture (partially anslated in Diop [1974a]), appeared in
1955. In 1960 he published L'tnité culturelle de Afrique noire (originally
translated as The Cultural Unity ofNegro Africa in 1963; republished in English
as
Diop [1989]). In the same year were issued L’Afrique noire précoloniale
(translated as Diop [1987]) and a more directly political tract, Les Fondements
cultirels,
techniques et industriels d’un état fédéral d'Afrique nove (Diop 1960; an
updated version is translated as
Diop [1984]). The first three books were all
based on successive versions of his doctoral thesis, which may partially
account for the considerable degree of repetition within them. The fourth
reflected another lifelong concern, which his historical writings were
designed to
support
—

his political Pan-Africanism and opposition to the

colonial and postcolonial ‘Balkanization’ of the continent. Aniérionté des
civilisations négres (1967; partially translated in Diop [1974a]) substantially

repeated earlier arguments by way of a response to critics —

especially the
Dakar professor Raymond Mauny, who had been one of the first to attack

Diop’s theses at length. In Parenté génétique de Végypuenpharaonique et des

langues négro-africaines (1977) he sought to marshal considerably more

linguistic evidence than hitherto in support of his claims for Egyptian

influence across black Africa. A sequel to this, supplementing its arguments
with extra evidence from linguistics, appeared posthumously as Nowvelles
recherches sur
Végyptienancien et les langues négro-africames modernes in 1988. His
final major work was the most ambitious. Civilisation ou barbarie: Anthropologie
sans
complaisance, published in 1981 (translated as Diop [1991]})* placed his
long-held views on Africa in the context of a general theory of human

development. Diop also composed many articles and addresses ~

perhaps
most influentially, papers for the two major conferences of Pan-African
intellectuals held by Présence Afrecame in 1956 and 1959, and his chapter in
the UNESCO General History of Africa (Mokhtar 1981) -

but on the whole

these do little but repeat themes from his books in briefer or more
polemical
form (many of these, mostly on issues of contemporary African politics, are
collected posthumously as Diop [1990]).*
Given this lifelong dedication to a single package of ideas, Diop's theses
may be summarized quite briefly. Both the biological origin of humanity,
and the emergence of civilization, took place in Africa. Egypt was the cradle
of the latter, was specifically a black or Negro civilization, and was the fullest

flowering of a cultural system unifying the whole African continent. That

cultural system not only originated most important aspects of human social
and intellectual development, but was distinct from Eurasian societies in its
matriarchal, spiritual, peaceable and humanistic character. Ancient Greece
~
and hence all European civilization -
took almost everything of value
usually claimed to be theirs from this antecedent African-Egyptian culture.
Africa, Diop urged, must recover the glories of its ancient past, rejecting the
colonial and racist mystifications which had obscured those glories, and
166 AFROGENTRISM

progress to the by drawing on the lessons

future of the old Nile valley
philosophies. The
political corollary of this is the need for a single, federal
African state which, taking confidence from the unique greatness of past
African achievements, will stand equal with Europe and the rest of the
world.
It would be wrong, however, to imply that Diop’s thought was entirely
static. The three books deriving from his doctoral research included many
very polemical assertions, some of which, he was later to suggest, had always
been intended as
hypotheses, provocations to others to conduct new

research, rather than firmly held beliefs. Later work, especially Civilization
or Barbarism, his 1981 magnum opus, was often rather dogmatic in tone
less
(though the tendency was not all one way, as the thoughts on comparative
historical sociology in Civilization or Barbarism are often more sweeping and
questionable, though based on wider reading, than those in the earlier
Precolonial Black Africa), lt also indicated a closer engagement with more

recent theories, especially French Marxist anthropology, with its revival of

the notion of an ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’. Diop took over the theory of
an Asiatic Mode with modifications (predictably, he preferred to call it the
Afruan Mode of Production); though he was still open to the charge of
often relying on out-of-date sources. If his primary purpose was always to
establish the historico-cultural unity of Africa, the ubiquitous influence of
ancient Egypt and the ‘blackness’ of the latter, a secondary but recurrent

theme in his work followed an

essentially Marxian problematic: to explain
what he saw as the millennia-long stable equilibrium of African societies,
the lack of social revolutions in their history (sce esp. Diop 1987, 1991 Part
IN).
Echoes of the Annales school of French historians could also be found in

Diop’s later writings, but largely without direct citation. Clearly what he was

attempting had at least clective affinities with the work

godfather of Annales
Fernand Braudel and others: like them, he was interested
history which in a

did not narrate events, but described very long-term changesin demogra-
phies, economies and cultures. He vision of the ‘longue
durée’, to use Braudel’s famous
was
essaying a

rallying-cry, in Africa. But this also meant

that classic faults of the Annales approach were replicated indeed, —

compounded in Diop’s writings. There

—
was little attention to chronology

or even
development over time: comparison between different precolonial
African socicties all too often seemed to
juxtapose motionless entities rather
than trace dynamic interaction. As two younger Senegalese researchers,
Mohamed Mbodj and Mamadou Diouf, have alleged, his comparative
method was
‘organized in terns of stratification, and therefore of immuta-

bility’ (1986: quoted in Gray 1989: 26).

Some of this was inherent in the nature of the sources establishing —

chronologies for precolonial African history is always notoriously difficult,

since neither oral tradition, nor
archacology, nor linguistic evidence can

provide a precise framework of dates. But it was exacerbated by what Jean

Duvignard reasonably complained was Diop’s tendency to ‘lyrical generalis-
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 167

ation and poetic assimilation’ (quoted in Gray 1989: 24); and it was equally
evident in cases where a fairly clear chronological account and a picture of

development over time were available. Thus Diop's discussions of ancient

Egyptian culture seemed to treat the near-3,000-year history of the successive
Pharaonic states single, static entity.
as a

This was something which his later view that Pharaonic Egypt was the

original version of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ only intensified (see,

among several such discussions, Diop [1967: 124-89]). What Marxist
theoreticians routinely abbreviated as the ‘AMP’ was itself a notably non-

developmental, homogenizing concept, and it was remarkably close to the

standard European prejudice against which Diop was protesting that Egypt —

and later African socicties were

stagnant civilizations, whereas ancient
Greece and modern Europe were dynamic ones.
Perhaps worse, his
treatment of comparative world revolutions in Civilization or Barbarism (1991:
chs 9-11), and his attempt to formulate ‘laws of ethnic relations’ (ibid.: ch,
7), jumped over centuries and continents with blithe abandon. It sometimes
seemed as if, to Diop, all history was
contemporary, the question of the
Pharaohs as immediate as that of neo-colonialism in Senegal: that his
of time non-linear (see Jewsiewicki 1989: 4-5; 1992: 106-7),
conception
almost the in manner
was

frequently associated with African cosmographies by

the more obscurantist ethnophilosophers (c.g. D. Pennington 1985) or the
most scornful European chroniclers.
We should perhaps remember, mitigation, that Diop’s early work had
in
been conducted not major impact of Braudel’s
only before the great book
on the Mediterranean world, which established the validity of a history not
based on events, but before publication of Jan Vansina’s groundbreaking
work on African oral history, or Joseph Greenberg's historical linguistics;
before the Leakeys made an African origin for humanity almost indubitable;
before the 1960s revival of a serious Marxist historiography indced, before —

many people took the idea of an African history seriously at all. Even in his
later life, Diop operated in a Francophone milicu where African historical
research remained seriously underdeveloped by comparison with the
English-speaking world (see, for exampic, Klein 1986).
Yet much of Diop’s work was evidently and badly flawed by its reliance on
out-of-date sources, a tendency which deepened as he grew older. As

Augustin Holl remarks, right up to his death Diop “behaved as if nothing

new had occurred in African archacology in gencral, and cspecially in West
African archaeology, history, linguistics, and social anthropology’ (Holl
1995: 207). His enthusiasm for the work of Leo Frobenius is a striking case

in point. Frobenius whose damaging—

early influence on
European
Africanism we have already noted was a
highly idiosyncratic German—

writer active in the 1890s, whose ideas may have appealed to Diop because
of his belief in Egyptian influences on West African civilization, or
simply
because he was less nakedly racist than most Africanists of his time; but he
had not been taken seriously by specialists for decades even at the time of

Diop’s first publications. The character of Frobenius’s efforts (memorably

168 AFROCENTRISM

satirized in Yambo Ouloguem’s novel Le Devoir de violence) is well summed

of
up in the savage assessment J.D. Fage:

encumbered theories relating to Adantis, to an Etruscan influence

by mystic
on African culture, and so on... a self-taught eccentric whose work is flawed
not only by his outlandish interpretations but also by his rapid, crude and
often destructive methods of fieldwork. (Fage 1981: 37-8)

In his contribution to the UNESCO General History of Africa, Diop relied

mainly on authorities daling anywhere from the 1830s to the 1930s,
referring to not a
single work on African Egyptian history that
or had
1981:
appeared less than twenty years before his essay’s publication (Diop
Nor does he anywhere to have discussed historico-
passem). appear any
philosophical theory that developed, even in France, during the 1960s or
1970s: for instance, I have found only one
passing, uninformative reference
in all Diop’s writings to that highly influential and controversial younger
figure in the field, Michel Foucault (Diop 1985: 19).
In The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, Diop builds his argument mostly
around disagreements with the theses of J.J. Bachofen, Lewis Henry Morgan
and Friedrich Engels rather than any more contemporary anthropological
theory. The peculiarity of this procedure will be apparent: here, as too often
elsewhere in his work, Diop was pursuing a debate with the Victorians
(Bachofen wrote in the 1860s, Morgan in the 1870s, Engels in the 1880s),
and failing to take modern research into account. This was poor enough
when Diop did his original work in the 1950s, worse when he repeated his
ideas virtually unchanged in the 1970s and 1980s, absurd when his Anglo-
fans still cite his theories the last word for the 1990s.
phone as

In his last book, Civilization or Barbarism, he makes much of Grimaldi Man

fossils and their alleged African origins —

reflecting ideas which had been

discredited long before the book was written, for it is generally accepted
nowadays that the Grimaldi fossils do not represent either a distinct human

subspecies or migration from Alrica

evidence of and even flogs the dead —

horse of the Piltdown Man forgery (1991: 13-16, 25-9, 39-52). He affirms
similarities between paintings and those of
prehistoric European cave

southern Africa (ibid.: 11-15) failing to note that as even Joseph Ki-Zerbo,
—

a Diop fan, admits (Ki-Zerbo 198]b: 660), the Sub-Saharan rock paintings
are newer than those in the Sahara, and both are considerably less old than
the European Palaeolithic specimens. There is good reason to think that
the rock art of southern Africa reflects a very old artistic tradition, going
back as far as 28,000 years (Phillipson 1993: 74-8), but most of the extant
remains are relatively recent, so comparison of iis images with the European
evidence of influence in e:ther direction; and there is
ones cannot provide
no other kind of evidence for such influence or diffusion (Ki-Zerbo 1981b:
660, 675; and sec also Whitney Davis 1990; Garlake 1995b),
Perhaps the most striking and surprising anachronism of all, the most

remarkable instance of Diop’s failure to keep abreast of new developments,

 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 169

was that the post-1960s explosion in Africanist history-writing, including the

substantial body of work by African historians themselves, barely features mn
his work. The Bibliography to Civilization or Barbarism includes several
references to commentaries on his own earlier books by his American

disciples —
some of them effusions of very dubious value but
hardly a
—

single piece of modern African historical research. Earlier, mentioning the

decline in the power of Yoruba kingship, he remarked: ‘It would be helpful
to know whether power preceded or resulted
this from
shrinkage of royal
the occupation’ (19'74a: 224); whereas
British if he had paid any attention
at all to African historiography he would have known of a mass of literature
ilhuminating this point, from Samucl Johnson’s pioneering chronicle (1921)
onwards.
Writing in of Senegalese intellectual
the context history, and especially
the new climates of
thought preceding independence, Michael Crowder
sees Diop’s significance as above all political. His work ‘gives an extreme

idealization of African (Crowder 1967: 55), and ‘contain[s] marked

elements of counter-racism’
history’
(ibid.: 57). The impact of these negative
tendencies, however, was in Crowder’s view, shortlived:

What is important is that a

Senegalese, of undoubted scholastic attainment,
had reinterpreted the history not only of his country but of the continent as

a whole, so that it could be put on

equal terms with that of Europe. (ibid.:
55)

Certainly Diop’s purpose was

primarily polemical and_ political. He
repeated throughout his career the claim that adopting his view of ancient
Africa and Egypt offered a
way forward politically, culturally and psychologi-
cally for twentieth-century Africans. As carly as 1956 he told the First
International Congress of Negro Writers and Arusts: ‘the ancicnt Egyptian
and Pharaonic civilization was a Negro civilization ... all Africans can draw
the same moral advantage from it that Westerners draw from Gracco-Latin
civilization’ (Diop 1956: 349-51). This notion of ‘moral advantage’, vague
as it may sound, was a constant with him, and became one of the ideas
which has resonated most strongly among later Afrocentrists. And in his last

major book he reiterated the same thought: ‘A look towards the Egypt of
is the best to conccive and build our cultural future’ (1991:
antiquity
3). He
way
suggested elsewhere
even that a
programme of educational reform
could be drawn from his historical views: ‘The new African hunranities must

build themselves on the foundations of the antique pharaonic culture.

Ancient Egyptian and Meroitic should replace Latin and Greek in (teach-
ing) programmes. Egyptian law should take the place of Roman law’ and -

Egyptian philosophy should be taught with that of Greece to show their

affinities (1977: xxv; see also 1991: 215-16). Diouf and Mbodj indeed allege
that for Diop: ‘history is nothing but a means to serve the realization of a

political plan’ (1992: 120).

that this political purpose at odds with
Diop did not feel, however, was
170 AFROCENTRISM

scholarship. Indeed, he insisted many times that his work was of value only
‘provided it does not depart from a strictly scientific terrain’ (Moore interview
1989: 375; original emphasis). His 1967 book Anténorié des crvilisations négres
carried an
epigraph from Brecht: ‘La vérité est concréte’ truth is concrete. —

What distinguished his views from the Senghorian version of négritude, he

his attention to the world of ascertainable facts rather
argued, was
precisely
than racial mystique:

my work history, sociology and linguistics kept to the path of objective

in
verifiable reality. By throwing light on the falsifications to which the historical
of the black man has been subjected, these historical, sociological and
past
linguistic studies serve to reinforce the cultural personality of Africans.
(Moore interview: 406)

also
critical, similar grounds, of ethnophilosophy. The study of
Diop was on

African thought would, he believed, become scientific only when cthnophi-

losophical cosmogonies:

their like in its sarcophagus. It is

occupy chronological place a mummy .. .

break from the structural study of

essential, therefore, to away atemporal
African because by isolating oneself from the historical frame-
cosmogonies,
work, one becomes exhausted in a false battle. (1991: 4)

If Diop saw the differences between himself and Senghorian main-

the
stream of
négrtude thought as the distinction between mysticism and science
(see 1991: 217~18), Senghor was inclined to see them as mostly gencrational

(quoted in Gray 1989: 41). But fundamentally, apart from directly political
role of race in history.
disputes, these were different conceptions of the

Senghor’s final message, as we have seen, was humanist and universalist,

albeit with modifications and inconsistencies was exclusivist and
Diop’s
—
—

essentialist. Senghor, symptomatically, did not sce the ancient Egyptians as

‘black’, but as a mixed population (sce Gray 1989: 44-5), and associated
this perception with his general positive view of hybridity or métissage.
Was Diop himself a racist? One must answer: no though one must —

this by saying that his thinking was always intensely, if not

qualify answer

entirely consistently, racial in its assumptions. He argued several times that

denial of the reality of race was merely a latter-day Eurocentric evasion:

The all the Occidentals, say there is no race. But they know very
Europeans,
well what a white man is... every time these relationships are not favorable
to the Western cultures, an effort is made to undermine the cultural
consciousness of Africans by telling them ‘we don’t even know what a race is’

(Finch interview 1989: 366-7; see also Diop 1991: 16-17)

 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 171

Race as genotype, he always believed, although it was

important from a

scientific point of view, was uninfluential historically; in the story of societies

and their relations, phenotype was all.

All of humanity’s historical and social relations, from the beginnings of time

right up to the nineteenth century, were ethnic relations, founded on

phenotype ...
humanity has been governed essentially in its development by
these ethnic confrontations. (Finch interview: 368)

In an earlier interview, however, he bad qualified this sweeping view,

suggesting that racism in anything like the modern sense was not ubiquitous
in Antiquity, though it could be discerned in the Assyrians and the Romans.
He often used the discredited term ‘Aryan’ in his earlier writings, though
he dropped it in Civilization or Barbansm, and even earlier he insisted that
his employment of it ‘has nothing to do with cither racial purity or any
other racis-intended notions’ (Moore interview 1989: 376-7).
Yet Diop certainly did not seem to believe that this past history of racial
conflict was cither desirable, or inevitably fated to continue in future.
Indeed, a rather vague kind of idealism governed his view of potential
futures (see Moore interview 1989: 378-9). Racial coexistence would be

possible ‘in a truly Socialist state, or a state that has adopted a

high moral

philosophy’ (Diop 1991: 124). He was convinced that acceptance of his

theories would lead to the unification first of Africa as a whole, then of all

humanity:

The rediscovery of the true past of the African peoples should not be a

divisive factor but should contribute to uniting them, cach and all, binding
them together from the north to the south of the continent so as to enable
them to carry out together a new historical mission for the greater good of
mankind. (1981: 51)

And he appeared
—

usually —

to want to insist, that when

too, he spoke of
race, he really meant culture ‘When we talk aboutpersonality, meaning the
personality of collective groups, we can only mean a cultural personality’
(Moore interview 408; original emphasis). If this appears to slide towards
the besetting sin in racialized thought —
of confounding race with culture —

his treatment of the latter concept also seemed radically inconsistent. In

interview in 1976, he said: ‘I consider culture as a rampart which protects a

people, a collectivity. Culture must above all play a

protective role; 11 must

ensure the group’ (Moore interview

cohesion 375; original emphasis).
of a

Elsewhere, appeared to take a less essentialist

however, he view, and to look
forward to a future of greater cultural intermingling. In replying to his critic
Raymond Mauny, he even apologized for ‘returning to notions of race,
cultural heritage, linguistic relationship, historical connections between

peoples, and so on. I attach no more importance to these questions than

they actually deserve’ (19'74a: 236).
172 AFROCENTRISM

those who all Africa’s ills coming from

Diop was
certainly not among saw

outside —

though of course this was his main emphasis —

or entirely
romanticized precolonial African cultures. For instance, he recognized lack
of literacy, and practices of passing on knowledge only through initiation
from the elders, as
major weaknesses. This was:

[NJot the best way to transmit or

generalize examination of scientific
Nor does this allow for the critical examination of
knowledge. system
scientific theories, This has been extremely harmful to the technological and
socialdevelopment of traditional black societies. The monopoly of knowl
edge by a restricted group of religious men has been detrimental. (Moore
miterview 382)

initial for between ancient connections

Egypt
Diop’s arguments strong
and Sub-Saharan Africa were grab-bag of disparate elements,
something of a

most of them sketchily described though in later writings he was -

considerably to expand the list, especially in relation to supposed linguistic

affinities. He mentions totemism, without putting forward any specific

common features at all on this front (1974a: 134-5; though see also 1967:
71-96); circumcision, for which the only specific instance he gives of belicis

paralleling the Egyptian comes from Dogon cosmology (1974a: 135-8);

divine kingship, on which he relies entirely on Charles Scligman’s far-
fetched (ibid: 138-9; see also 1991: 181); cosmogony,
theories for which
the Dogon are the sole and
Father Tempels and, again, Marcel Griaule on

unquestioned authorities (139-41; see also £967; 108-14), and which

Diop an ‘identity of mental

to structure of genius, culture, and
suggest ...

race’ between Egyptians and ‘Negroes’ (ibid.: 140-41); a supposedly shared

matriarchal system, although Diop fails to offer any evidence whatsoever
that ancient Egypt was matriarchal (142-5); and kinship patterns, in relation
to which he appears to wander off the point altogether to mention tenuous

similarities between names of gods aud to assert, both irrelevantly and

groundlessly: "When Mohammed was born, Arabia was a
Negro colony’
(151). Finally he turns to language, proclaiming that it ‘is casy to prove the
profound unity of Egyptian and Negro languages’ (153). In fact Diop was to
spend much of the rest of his life in a vain attempt to do just that.
The assertion which Diop throws in of seventh-century Arabia as a ‘Negro
to imply that the Prophet himself a black
colony’ (presumably intended was

African, though it is intriguing that Diop, with his own Islamic upbringing,
never returned to any more detailed elaboration of this claim") is not

untypical tendency to weaken

of his his own credibility by inserting
his main theories. He
implausible suggestions quite unconnected to specu-
lated also about ancient contacts between Africa and the Americas, his
‘evidence’ being the vaguc similarities among &vo Eskimo words, one North
American Indian one, two Wolof ones, the name of a Mexican city, and

(quite bizarrely) an old German song title (1974a: 183)! This piece of wild
assertion that the Inuit black, later
speculation, with Diop’s subsequent are
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 173

helped to form the basis for quite elaborate theorizing (or mythologizing)
by Ivan Van Sertima and his collaborators (Van Sertima 1977, 1985), as we

shall see. In similar offhand style, Diop proclaimed ‘no doubt on the
southern and Negro origin of the megaliths in Brittany’ (1974a: 194). He

assemblage of illustrations in book with a series of

captioned an one

emphatic assertions about the ‘negroid’ nature of various Egyptian represen-

tations, The Pharaoh Dejezer ‘typical sheops was seen as

‘resembling the contemporary Cameroonian type’. The Sphinx showed

was a
negro’. a

it is neither Hellene Semite: it is Bantu’, In

‘typical negro profile nor ...

work ‘the suppleness of body and allure of movements’

Egyptian scenes,

indicated their cssential Africanicity (1967: Plates xvii, xviii, xix, xxxiv).
Most tenuously of all, pictures of hairstyles (ibid.: Plates xxxv—xl) and of
‘totemistic’ images (Plates xliv~xlviii), of the Malian Gao
supposedly or

mosque, with its imagined resemblance to an

Egyptian step pyramid (Plate
Ixxxiii), were held to prove intimate connections. In a later article (Diop
1973) he clarmed, mainly on the basis of linguistic affinities, to be able to
identify the precise original home of the Senegalese peoples in the Nile
valley.
None of this is to say that there is no arguing for connections
plausibility in
between ancient Egypt and particular specific, later, Sub-Saharan
traits in
African cultures. However, a more careful scholar than Diop, Benjamin Ray,

points out that while there are some

superficially quite striking resemblances
between ideas for instance, about kingship and those of the
Egyptian
—
-

Baganda kingdom in what is now Uganda, even there:

If had once been part of a unified kingship complex to which

kingship ...

ancient Egypt belonged. surely Buganda and Bunyoro would have retained
some elements identical to those of ancient Egypt. But none are to be found.

(Ray 1991: 196)

counsels caution in presuming that similarities are evidence of

Ray great
direct influence. Not a
single Egyptian artifact has ever been found in Sub-
Saharan East Africa (ibid.: 196). The ideas about kingship which do seem

to be similar are not uniquely African: parallels can be found all over the
world (ibid.; 197-8). Remnants of ancient Egyptian kingship ‘simply cannot

be recognised’ in East Africa (198).

It is possible, too, that the ritual and monumental burials, mostly dating
from ¢500 to 1000 cr, to be found broadcast from Mali, across the savannah,
Gambia and Senegal Igbo Ukwu in Nigeria, be
to present-day or may
connected in some as yet unknown way to one another, and may even owe

something (o at least indirect influence

by Egyptian practices of monumental
burial (Shaw 1970; Phillipson 1993; 177-80). It is possible, but as yet still
entirely speculative. One might suggest, however, that if there is a case to

be made of the kind Diop urges, it must be validated by a significant

number of detailed studies like Ray's or Shaw’s. Diop’s own sweeping,
impressionistic and emotive presentation, so often based not only on
 174 AFROCENTRISM

tenuous evidence on unwarranted

but generalization from the Francophone
West African especially Senegalese experience, has failed to convince
and
those not already strongly predisposed to be convinced.
It is notable that in their lists of supposed proofs for ancient Egypt's
‘Negro origin’ (and, the other side of the same coin, later Egyptian
influences across the continent) neither Diop nor those who followed his

hypothesis later mentioned the dog that conspicuously did not bark, to

invoke the timeworn Sherlock Holmes cliché: material culture. If cultural

contact and direct influence across the
length Sahara and down the whole
of the valley had been considerable,
Nile one would naturally expect to find
material objects of Egyptian origin broadcast across archacological sites in
the Sub-Saharan regions. Yet these hardly exist: the fact that archacologists
have found only a tiny handful of them, all very small and of unknown

history, is a powerful picce of negative evidence concerning Egyptian

influence further south or, indeed, vice versa.

Another of Diop’s most constantly reiterated ideas was of an absolute

contrast between African civilizations and those of the rest of the world (as
he usually expressed it; though presumably he meant the Old World —
and
he had very little specific to say about South, Southeast or East Asia). The
respects in which Africa was culturally unified,
sharply opposed to and

everywhere else, could be ‘discerned in the organization of the family and

of the State, in the concept of royalty, and in the philosophic and moral

systems’ (1959: 66). His greatest emphasis was on the first, family structure,
to which he devoted major parts of two of his more important books, The
Cultural Unity of Black Africa and Civilization or Barbarism?, as well as

numerous arucles and shorter passages elsewhere. The contrast. was simple
~

Africa was matriarchal; everywhere else was patriarchal. It derived from

environmental considerations (as we have secn, Diop was an extreme

in
environmental determinist) and produced a huge range of contrasts
social organization, behaviour, character, beliefs and art: all of them, of
course, contrasts in which the African way was superior.
This led him to numerous rather wild claims: such as that the Grecks
routinely killed three-quarters of the children born to them by deliberate
exposure (1959: 67); that Eurasia existed in a state of ‘endemic war’ as

against Africa's peaceableness (ibid.: 70); that Eurasians were uniformly

pessimistic, while African world-views were always based optimism
on so —

that only the former could have invented the idea of tragedy (1989:
152-65); and many more. Some of these are, of course, simple inversions
of classic Euro-racist themes, European colonial writers had said that Africa
embroiled in tribal social while Europe had achieved
was
permanently wars,

so
peace, Diop reversed the statement.
This
argument, counterposing the Euro—Asian ‘Northern cradle’ and the
African ‘Southern cradle’ of sharply contrasting civilizations, was most

systematically developed in The Cudtural Unity of Black Africa (1989), though

or Barbarism.
he repeated it in several works up to and including Civilization
‘Of necessity,” Diop thought, ‘the earliest men were ethnically homogeneous
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 175

and negroid’ (1981: 27). The sedentary and matriarchal roots of African

society led to its being peaceful, organicist, solidaristic and collectivist.

Cultures springing from the later ‘Northern cradle’ are individualist,
competitive, preoccupied with blood and misery, They are devoted to ‘An
ideal of war, violence, crime and conquests, inherited from nomadic life,
with as a
consequence, feeling of guilt and of original sin’ (ibid.: 177).
a

African cultures are distinguished by the emancipation of women,

also by
peace, justice and goodness, and by an ideal of human worth which, Diop
bizarrely asserted, ‘makes moral or matcrial misery unknown (in Africa) to
the present day’ (ibid.: 177).
The Mediterranean formed a border zone, dominated by first matriar-
chal, then patriarchal, modes. West Asia, meanwhile, was a ‘zone of
confluence’ between the systems (1981: 84-101): from there, patriarchy
made inroads into Africa only with the coming of Islam (ibid.: 60-61).° The
idea latterly popular among
—
feminists that human societies in general ~

had followed a
chronological succession from matriarchy to patriarchy,
however, was naturally one that Diop rejected with indignation; he therefore
polemicized at length against anthropological theories which asserted this,
like those of Lewis Henry Morgan, J.J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels (1989:
5~46).
Also peculiar is the way in which Diop gives separate consideration to

ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya in turn, while he lumps all Sub-Saharan
Africa together in an undifferentiated mass (1989: 47-64) a
procedure -

which threatens to repeat the very distinction that Diop is so often praised
for challenging: one between literate ‘high’ civilizations and fundamentally
less interesting ‘lower’ African cultures.
After his extensive but strikingly ahistorical discussion of family structures,

occupying far the greater bulk of the book, Diop turned to a rather

arbitrary-seeming list of ‘other aspects of northern and meridional cultures”

(1989: 130). He began with the idea of the state. In Africa this was founded,
from the days of the Pharaohs, on
‘xenophilia’ (ibid.: 134) and the ‘spirit of
justice and picty’ (149). War and conquest were
entirely alien to it until
they were introduced from outside (150). The origins of the state idea in
the North, by contrast, were not only xenophobic and aggressive but ‘very
soon
developed into a totalitarianism’ (135), This difference could also be
seen in the domain of religion: the gods of Africa were kindly; those of
Eurasian cultures like Greece, Assyria and pagan Germany were aggressive,
greedy and amoral (141-50). Philosophical systems on which Diop —

approvingly cited the mystifying ideas of the colonialera Belgian priest

Maurice Tempels (138) and imaginative literature
-

(151-65) reflected the

same essential division (the posthumously republished 1962/1989 makes
the same
arguments in rather more concise form).
Diop was cvidently -

plaintively
even of the limitations
—
of what he
aware

could do as
a solitary, multidisciplinary researcher, even hinting that charges
of dilettantism might reasonably be levelled at his efforts. He spoke several
times of his wish that a large interdisciplinary research team, which he
176 AFROCENTRISM

might direct, should take over the baton from him (Finch interview [1989]:
361; Moore interview [1989]: 376; Van Sertima and Williams interviews
[1986]: 291-5; Spady 1986: 92). Working without such a team, his sheer
breadth of interests, the ambitiousness of what attempting, he was no doubt
help to account not only for the scepticism with which he was viewed by
many specialists, and for his failure to keep up with contemporary research
in his various areas of concern, but for the heterogeneous, almost fragmen-
tary nature of his last major work.
Civilization or though it is Diop’s most substantial
Barbarism, and in many
ways most interesting juxtaposes book,
bewilderingly diverse kinds of

argument without any very evident logical order of exposition. It starts with
an overview of human origins, based on alarmingly outdated evidence and

reiterating a somewhat redundant case for Africa as cradle of Homo sapiens,

then proceeds, via reflections on the Adlantis myth and the birth ofEgyptian
civilization, to sweeping claims on the whole history of tribal organization,
race, social class, states and revolutions, inchiding extensive but ill-mtegrated
discussion of Marxist ideas about the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’. A brief
interlude on the nature of cultural identity and mtercultural relations —

again quite startlingly ahistorical —

is followed by two long chapters, radically

unconnected with what has gone before, on ancient Egyptian ‘science’
(mainly mathematics, where he once more seems overwhelmingly reliant
on works dating from the 1920s and 1930s; Robert Palter [1996a:
esp. 235-6, 240-41] showing how ill-evidenced
has no trouble are
Diop's in

claims in this sphere) and ‘philosophy’ (including a strangely assorted

collection of religious doctrines which embrace such ‘philosophical con-
cepts’ as ‘girl’, ‘female noble’, ‘to remember", ‘the desert’ and the number
five [1991: 360-61] and their supposed influence on Greece [sce also, as
an earlier and sketchier version of this argument, Diop 1967: 216-30]).° As
an omnrm
gatherum of Diop’s different preoccupations, Civilization or

Barbarism is a kind of summation to his career. As a coherent argument, or

as a book with any appearance of having becn composed as a book rather

than a collection of disparate fragments, it is a bewildering anticlimax, a

failure.
Diop’s concerns may have been diverse, but they were not universal. His
interest religionim was
apparently slight. He rarely emphasizes it in his

major writings, beyond passing comments that, for instance, Akhnaten

would be recognized as the ‘first prophet’ of monotheistic belicf were it not
for racism (Finch interview 1989: 364-5). His own Islamic upbringing plays
little, if any, overt role in his work (Diop 1987: 162-75 is indeed quite
critical of Islam's influence in Africa); nor, unlike many more
mystically
inclined Afrocentrists, significant claims about the truth-
does he make any
value of the Egyptian beliefs he studied. Equally unlike them, Diop’s writings
show no
particular hostility to Christiaan or
Judaic faiths and he seems —

entirely free of one major disturbing tendency in latter-day Afrocentricity,

anti-Semitism. For that matter, Diop was not even particularly anti-Zionist:
in interview, he expressed nothing stronger than disappointment with
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 177

Isracli foreign policy, especially in relation to Israel’s links with South Africa,
and predicted that eventually Isracli and Arab cultures would merge because
of their great intrinsic similarities (Moore interview 1989: 394-6).
Among the earliest and powerful objections
most Diop’s work was that to

proposed by Raymond Mauny, who was for many years Professor of African

history at Dakar, Senegal, and among the most important pioncers of

archacological research in Francophone Africa (de Barros 1990: 162-7
traces his career and influence). Mauny’s review essay was thought sul-
ficiently important to be still reprinted in a Problems in African History
textbook as recently as 1993 (Collins 1993), and Diop replied at length in
his Antériorué des civilisations négres (in Diop 19'74a; for the French original,
which also takes on Jean Suret-Canale and Maurice Devisse, see Diop 1967:
231-79). Without doubt, Mauny’s case had some notable flaws. If Diop
relied excessively on an uncritical reading of sources whose reliability was
already very suspect in the light of the state of knowledge when he began
researching, such as Frobenius or D.P. de Pedrais, Mauny’s critique
depended on some equally tainted authorities. His source for controverting

Diop on the racial make-up of the ancient Egyptians was Carleton S.

Coon’s work, almost the last would-be authoritative exposition of classic
European racial ‘science’ (see esp. Coon 1962). In relying on it, Mauny
placed himself on the worst possible ground in both scholarly and political
terms.

Coon’s underlying argument

—
that several (probably five) quite separate
hominid groups had existed for at least several hundred thousand years and
had thereafier converged, but only very imperfectly and unevenly so,

towards a ‘civilized’ condition —

may help to indicate why views which were

the polar opposite of this, extreme diffusionism and environmental deter-

minism, were so attractive to anti-Eurocentrists like Diop. However,
Diop’s
diffusionism quite apart from the apparent
-
shakiness of the evidence he
can adduce for particular instances of cultural diffusion is one of his
~

Achilles heels. He merely assumes, without that any idea or

argument, in of them and
practice found in different places must have started one

then spread or been carried to the others. The Greeks, he insisted, can have
had no ‘autonomous thinking’ enabling them to ‘create civilization’:
otherwise they would have done so before their contact with Egypt (Finch
interview 1989: 363). This overlooks the powerful arguments and evidence,
from a host of spheres of human activity, that similar cultural forms, beliefs
and practices can arise quite separately in distinct and distant socicties.
Moreover, there is an irony in Diop and his followers adopting naive
diffusionism as an antiracist creed. The original extreme diffusionists were

themselves racists or cultural supremacists, believing that all human achieve-

ments had begun with one group Greeks, or —

‘Aryans’, or whoever and ~

been carried (usually by physical expansion and conquest, as in the Hamitic

Diop has taken the structure of

hypothesis for Africa) elsewhere. over

argument, shifted the original location to one more congenial to him, and
reproduced all the faults of the carlier European versions.
 178 AFROCENTRISM

Muchof the argument for diffusionism and Egyptian origins in the work
of Diop and his disciples rests on a highly selective, rather idiosyncratic
comparative ethnography of African socicties. Quite apart from the inade-
quacies of the account thus given, which appear to be numerous, there is a
basic methodological flaw in this procedure, as Jan Vansina explains:

The social and cultural differences among related peoples are a

product of
their past history. It would therefore seem
proper first to document such
differences precisely at a given moment in time and later to explain the
differences as
divergence from the original situation to the situations

today.... The variants would then be seen as a set of transformations from

the single ancestral situation the
multiple contemporary
to ones. Each variant
would be a step in a /ogical pathway of development... Yet such an exercise .

is not a Austoncal reconstruction. Historical and logical developments need

not be identical. For example, it could easily be argued that marriage with
bridewealth is a logical transformation of the practice of exchanging one

woman for another. But it cannot be demonstrated by this deduction alone

that the latter practice is in fact anywhere older than the former. There ...

does not seem to be a way to avoid anachronism if one relies only on a

comparison of contemporary cultural or social features. Straightforward
comparative ethnography cannot be used as a source of history. (Vansina
1990: 9-10; original emphasis)

It should hardly need to be added that the difficulties are

compounded,
not resolved, if one’s initial step is to document similarities rather than
differences, Diop docs; and if, moreover,
as this documentation scems

extremely unsystematic and proceeds from an a

priori assumption that
diverse peoples are necessarily related.
It is beyond my competence to assess in detail the linguistic evidence for
the cultural unity of ancient Egypt and later black Diop Africa, which
advances in successive books. However, the non-specialist can reasonably
seek to evaluate the general principles and methodology by which Diop’s
ventures into historical linguistics proceed. These, too, appear extremely
unsystematic, in ways that greatly weaken his overall case, and despite their

ever-increasing elaboration —

the 1977 Parenté génétique included a Wolof-

Ancient Egyptian lexicon of over 200 pages.’
The basic flaw is that in order
the history of languages, to identify
to trace

shared roots, patterns of evolution and

divergence, it is entirely inadequate
to list similar-sounding or
possibly related terms in different
simply
languages. Almost however long the lists are, they can
provide litthe more

than an a priori case for investigating the possibility of common origins. Not
all similarities imply links; while such listing of similaritics cannot tell us
much at all about the history of the language users: when, how, by what
routes did one language influence the other, or
(perhaps more likely*) how
and when did both diverge from a shared ancestor?
The fundamental principle of historical linguistics is that all languages
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 179

change over time, and related

so languages. Thus
diverge increasingly from
the more differences neighbouring languages, the
there are between two

further back in time they must have diverged. But comparative linguistics
cannot give us absolute dates: the rate of language change is not constant,
and the ‘original’ splitting off of two languages from one another is always
a
process a
long-drawn-out one
—
rather than a
single, dateable event. —

Where the comparison is between a

long-dead language and living ones,
evidently enough, still further problems supervene (sce, for example,
Mokhtar 1981: 63).
Attempts at statistical analysis have usually proceeded by drawing up lists
of a few hundred basic words, which should be as little culturally loaded as

possible and which therefore change only very slowly over time. Diop’s lists
do not conform to these criteria. He makes no
apparent attempt to

formulate a vocabulary,
systematic distinguish ‘core’ or to between words
with strong cultural,
religious or ideological overtones and those without.
The closely similar
percentage of words from this basic list which two

languages share provides an indicator of how closely related the languages

are with an entry on
—

the list counting as positive only if form and sound

are very similar and the meanings adentical, and with the whole process
having validity only if one afeady has strong reasons to think that the two
languages share a common ancestor. Diop’s listings, again, fail to meet.
these criteria.
Two languages can, of course, also have words in common because in
one of them they are ‘loanwords’ taken over from the other language.
There are
techniques for trying to decide whether a
given word is a loanword
(Vansina 1990: 14~16); but Diop, once again, does not use them. Flis
evidence gives us no means of deciding whether the presence of similar-
sounding words in Egyptian and Wolof indicates common ancestry, or later

borrowing by one from the other, or the if time-scale and routes for either
they exist at all, similarity is mere
or even coincidence.
if the Where Diop
sets outs his methodological protocols, they seem somewhat lax: ‘kinship
between two given languages is of the genetic type if the concordances are

numerous and are verified for the complete system: as is the case for

personal pronouns in romance languages’ (1977: xvii). But of course, we

already know that the Romance languages are closely related to one

another; there is a large difference between reconfirmation and speculation.

Diop’s best-known intellectual disciple is the Congolese historical linguist

Théophile Obenga, who has clearly also been the most important of the
relatively few African historians who have sought to pursue and extend
Diop’s line of thought. Obenga, a little younger than Diop, was born in
Brazzaville in 1930, from a Mbochi-speaking background: he has sought to
trace parallels between Mbochi and ancient Egyptian languages, just as Diop
has done with his native Wolof.
Obenga’ §
university training was varied: he
studied at Pittsburgh University in the USA, and at the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Eudes, the Collége de France, and the University of Bordeaux. By
contrast with Diop’s long years as permanent oppositionist in Senegal
180 AFROCENTRISM

Obenga spent periods in the Congo Republic’s corridors of power, serving

in {975-7 under the Marxist of Marien
as Foreign Minister government
Ngouabi. Thereafter he acted as Director of Research at the ‘Centre
International des Civilisations Bantu’ in Libreville, Gabon; but he has

recently moved to the USA to take up a

post at Molefi Asante’s Temple
University, Philadelphia department, the main centre of US Afrocentrism.®
A prolific author whose publications include poetry as well as historical and
he far in the of Présence
political works, was more heavily represented pages
Afneaine than was his mentor; his ten articles there include two specifically
on the work Diop of and others on African historiography from a devoutly

More
perspective. recently, he extended tribute has produced an
Diopian
to Diop’s influence, seeing the master as understanding having transformed
of the history of Egypt. Africa and, indeed, the world (Obenga 1996).
Obenga also contributed a
chapter to the first vohame of the UNESCO
General History ofAfrica one of the weakest and most
~

problematic pieces in
those extremely uneven volumes.
is, the whole, less nakedly polemical in approach than Diop,
Obenga on

and more fully prepared to espouse universalist rather than nationalist

his Pour nowvelle histowre (1980) spoke in Senghorian terms
conceptions —

une

of all human contributing to a universal

groups cultural inheritance; while
A Lost Tradition (1995), though mainly devoted to familiar Diopian asser-
tions about African cultural unity and uniqueness, seeks to place these in an
ecumenically global context. Yet he, too, could come out with totalizing
claims, especially on behalf of ancient Egypt, which have no
apparent
historical warrant, such as that ‘there was never slavery in
Egyptian society
at the time of the Pharaohs’, and that women were fully liberated and had

equal righis (Obengathere His major1992: early work, L‘A/rique

162-3).
dans VAntiquté (1973), follows broadly the same trajectory as Diop’s books,
substantially repeating or, at best, deepening
—
the line of inquiry, rather —

than broadening it or
bringing new
types of evidence into play. His
discussions of the African biological origins of humanity (1973: 1-16), of
the blackness of the ancient Egyptians (ibid: 53-90) and of relations
between Egypt and Nubia (91-127) tread almost entirely m the master’s
footsteps, though on the last especially, Obenga uses more
up-to-date
archaeological evidence than Diop had done. This is true also of the two

major themes on which Obenga did break new ground: in his extensive
discussions of the idea that there must have becn a
single, ancestral ‘Negro-
African language’ (221-331), and of African writing systems (355-443). He
shares with Diop, however, a tendency to make judgements which scem to

owe more to nationalism than to academic caution. Thus, in his eagerness

to refute European assumptions that precolonial Africa had been near-

illiterate, he describes forms of writing such phenomena as the

uniformly as

Yoruba's ‘Aroko’ method of sending messages by an claborate system of

and the limited of signs employed by the
knot-tying (361-79), very range
Gicandi of Kenya and the Mum of Cameroon. To regard such forms of
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 181

communication as
equivalent to writing in, say, French, Arabic or Hausa is
to stretch the definition of literacy very far indeed.
Obenga’s founding assumption has remained the same as
Diop’s: that
‘from Ancient Egypt’s impact on the culture of the rest of the African
continent to the unity of all African languages, African history is one
continuous, unbroken narrative of people
a with a shared consciousness’
(1995: v). It seems generally to be accepted that his linguistic researches are

more solidly grounded than Diop’s, though the essential beliefs are identi-
cal. Obenga had more extensive formal training in linguistics, as well as in
history, than did his mentor, including immersion in the work of Ferdinand
de Saussure, whom he described as an even more
important influence on

him than Diop himself. He has also, in his more recent work, offered a

fuller discussion of ancient Egyptian belief systems and their alleged

relationships with those of Sub-Saharan Africa than Diop, or any American
Afrocentrist, has done (see Obenga 1989, 1990). He has been no more

successful than Diop, though, in gaining widespread acceptance for his

views among specialists, most of whom apparently find his classification
system for African languages ‘reckless’ (Gray 1989: 104). Although he, like
Diop, produced extensive listings of words allegedly common to ancient

Egyptian and various West African languages, his main claims derived from

something broader and the belief that ‘if is a social fact,

vaguer:
fact, and if all language implies an “idcology”’, then
language
an
eminently cultural
everything suggests ‘a single cultural universe of pharaonic Egypt and the
rest of black Africa’ (Obenga 1988: 25).
Apart from Obenga, Diop seems to have had few productive disciples
among African historians. As Diouf and Mbodj note, even in Senegal itself
there was neither substantial critical discussion of his work nor a
Diopian
‘school’; they cite only P.F. Diagne and A.A. Dieng, both philosophers
rather than historians, as
exceptions. The small group of Senegalese

Egyptologists which emerged in Paris in the 1980s was quite separate from
Diop’s influence (Diouf and Mbodj 1992: 126, 128-9). In the Anglophone
African world, similarly, it is a polemicist on the nature of African philos-
ophy, Henry Olela, rather than historical or
anthropological researchers,
who stands most obviously in the Diopian mould.'! Olela’s work is more

extreme in its claims and far more feebly based in its standards of evidence
than that of Diop. It largely repeats the familiar assertions on the African
origins of Greek thought, relying on T.R. Clark's Myth and Symbolin Ancient
Keypt and on such dubious sources as James's Stolen Legacy, Yosef Ben-
Jochannen and Albert Churchward (Olela 1981, 1984: see also the damning
critique in Masolo 1994; 19-21, 41). Olcla also ‘overtrumps’ most Afrocentr-
ists by proclaiming a Central—-East African origin for all Egyptian, and hence
Mediterranean, civilization: moving the ‘cradle of civilization’ still further
south than Diop had done. Olela, for reasons left unexplained, calls ancient

Egypt ‘Sais’ after a major Nile Delta city which was briefly capital of an
independent state in the last days of Pharaonic Egypt, rather than (like most
Afrocentrists) naming it ‘Kemet’ (1984: 79). As another West African
 182 AFROCENTRISM

appropriation of Diop’s ideas has taken

scholar, Augustin Holl, laments,
place mostly in ‘uncritical oversimplified’ forms (Holl 1995:
and 204).
This lack of a really productive intellectual legacy deriving from Diop
makes it hard to dissent from the judgement of Mamadou Diouf and
Mohamed Mbodj:

Anta from
There problem: to question the work
is the of Cheikh Diop, even

tine with African

a
point of view, was for a long
scientific synonymous
antipatriotism; to refer to it in passing was an obligation one could readily
fulfill, in academic work; to its principies, often
especially repeat great
without any real knowledge of the work itself, was a certificate of nationalism
and Pan-Africanism. In any case, a dynamic oeuvre —

paradoxically —

paralyzed the African intellects or caused them to look elsewhere, (1992:

118-19)

The popular alternative

most place to look was Marxism. If, in the sphere
of oppositional knowledges of Africa, the great opponent or alternative to

Diopian culturalism and radical nationalism is seen to be Marxist-influenced

studies of African history, there can be no doubt which has becn more

productive. Marxism in Africa, politics, has

however miserable its failure as

been cnormously fruitful as historiography. Diopian unanimism, by contrast

—
even if it might, in the master’s own hands, have offered promise as a
research agenda has almost —

wholly betrayed that promise. His disciples, as

Diouf and Mbodj lament, have merely repeated his principles. The result
has been intellectual paralysis. There were, as we have noted, significant
Marxist influences on
Diop'’s own thought, especially the earlier books (esp.
Diop 1987); but his overwhelming emphasis on culture and race as opposed
to economic and social structure makes it extremely misleading to describe
him as a Marxist. The few attempts to do so (e.g. Masilela 1994: 312-13)
seem very forced.
Thus surprising that few historians
it is not of Africa have been persuaded
by Diop’s linguistic or other arguments about the ancient past. We can note
only a few, representative instances of their reactions to his work, The

leading French radical Africanist Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, virtually

damning with faint praise, speaks of Diop’s ‘intuitions’ having merit despite
his ‘demonstrations, which barely escape the shoricut common to a —

number of researchers to want to explain too—

much’ (1992: 64). Perhaps

the most eminent, now venerabie, modern expert on West African archae-

ology is Thurstan Shaw. His overview of West African prehistory was fairly
dismissive of Diop and his associates:

Some writers have sought to give dignity and lustre to West African history
by trying to show connections with or even actual migrations from ancient

Egypt. to enable West Africa to bask in its reflected glory; not only is this not

necessary but a
rigorous examination of the proffered evidence shows that it
is being asked to carry more than it can bear, (Shaw 1976: 61)
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 183

He repeated the same

argument in his contribution to the UNESCO General
History ofAfrica, adding:

the third millennium before our cra, which was the time when metallurgy,
writing, monumental building in stone, the use of the wheel and centralized

government became firmly established in Egypt, was also the millennium of

the final desiccation of the Sahara when people were
moving out of it and
when it could no
longer serve as an indirect link between Egypt and West
Africa. (Shaw 1981: 628)

It is difficult to see
quite why Valentin Mudimbe should believe that a

Diopian vision of history was ‘rigorously reworked in two monumental

undertakings, the Cambridge and UNESCO histories of Africa’ (Mudimbe
1994: 24). In fact contributors to the UNESCO volumes
sharply were

divided on whether there is any serious merit Diop's ideas

in a matter we —

shallexplore in a moment while the

~

Cambridge texts (J.D. Clark 1982),

produced by a team almost bound to be less sympathetic to such perspec-
tives, dismiss them in silence. Diop’s work is not once mentioned or even

footnoted in the Cambridge volume on ancient African history.'*

Some critics felt, indeed, that the influence of Diopian theories had a

generally damaging effect development, helping, for

on
historiographical
instance, to make early volumes of the UNESCO History a murky battle-
ground of competing, unresolved views. David Phillipson complained of the
first that its ideologically diverse chapters ‘show relatively little unity of
purpose or
presentation’ (Phillipson 1982: 115). A non-Diopian contributor,
Joseph Greenberg, had his views on the Semitic affiliations of the ancient

Egyptian language flatly contradicted by an anonymous Diopian editor (Ki-

Zerbo 1981: 298 presumably this is Ki-Zerbo
—

himself). In the second

volume, as another reviewer, Michael Brett, complained Diop’s chapter is: —

followed by a long résumé of a

symposium on the subject held in 1974,
inserted by way of a corrective to this
(Diop’s) idiosyncratic view. As a result,
there is no discussion at all of pre-dynastic Egypt and the settlement of the
Nile vailey which made possible the subsequent civilization. (Brett 1982: 117)

The Egyptian historians themselves were the fiercest objectors to Diop's

ideas at the Cairo symposium, and as the UNESCO volume’s rapporteur
admits, the argument ‘often took the form of successive and mutually
contradictory monologues’ (Mokhtar 1981: 49). Abdelgadir M. Abdalla
scorned the idea that there was any importance in establishing whether
ancient Egyptians were black, negroid, or whatever (ibid.: 63). Abu Bakr
insisted that ‘the Egyptians had never been isolated from other peoples.
They had never constituted a
pure race and it was impossible to accept the
idea that in the Neolithic period the population of Egypt was entirely black’
(ibid.: 67-8). On the issue of whether Egypt’s carly peopling had included
substantial immigration or invasion, ‘it became clear that there was total
184 AFROCENTRISM

disagreement’, with Diop, claiming that there had been, very much in the

minority (ibid.: 71).!* As for the nature of the available historical evidence
itself, Diop’s claims clearly bemused many other participants at Cairo. He
insisted that the physical-anthropological views of nineteenth-century Euro-

pean observers were good enough to obviate need for further analysis, as

Vercoutter’s view that almost all such testimony from before

against Jean
1939 was simply unscientific surprisingly, ‘Professor
(ibid.: 74),
Diop’s Not
forceful affirmation by many participants’ (ibid.: 74).
was criticized
Almost a decade later, Wyatt MacGaffey echoed Phillipson’s and Brett’s
complaints that dispute over Egypt’s ethnicity and influence had become a

sterile dialogue of the deaf (MacGaffey 1991). And Peter L. Shinnic, the
veteran archaeologist who had directed pathbreaking excavations at Meroé,

was yet more caustic. All the Egyptian chapters in the UNESCO History
volume ‘are uncontroversial, orthodox and somewhat old-fashioned’, with
one
exception:

The one unconventional, though extremely old-fashioned, chapter on Egypt

is the opening one
by Cheikh Anta Diop. He presents once
again his peculiar
view about the nature of the ancient Egyptian population and the closeness
of the Walaf (Wolof) and Ancient Egyptian languages, relying on out-of-date
sources andapparently unaware of the extensive recent research into the
human biology of the populations of the Nile Valley.

It was, Shinnie alleged, ‘clear that (Diop) learnt

he nothing’ from the Cairo
conference. The summary of that meeting included in the volume not only
contradicts, but ‘serves as an
apology for’ his chapter: ‘It seems that
UNESCO and (volume editor) Mokhtar were embarrassed by the unscho-

larly and preposterous nature of Diop’s views but were unable to

reject his
contribution’ (Shinnie 1981: 540).
Accounts of the Cairo meeting —

none of them written by actual

participants, apart from the UNESCO report itself and the summary
included in the General
History ofAfrica vary greatly, with Diop’s disciples
—

trying in
slightly slippery fashion to claim a moral victory for him and
Obenga there (e.g. Van Sertima 1989: 323-4). Chris Gray even asserts that
the conference ‘was clearly a triumph’ for Diop and Obenga (1989:
14-15).'" This seems
very far from the truth. The participants who —

included five Egyptian and five French experts, though only one American
and no British Egyptologists seem, as Shinnie suggests,
-
to have been
mainly hostile to Diop’s theories (‘Annex to Chapter 1’ in Mokhtar 1981).
The controversies, and the political tensions they reflected, produced in
called a
the eventual UNESCO volumes what Bogumil
Jewsiewicki acidly

conformism more suitable to statesmen than to historians. The euphemisms,

pleonasms dialogues and of the deaf serve for example to conjure away the
black origins. Instead of presenting an
prickly question of pharaonic Egypt’s
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 185

important epistemological debate, there is a discussion by proxy, What can

the uninitiated reader make of it? (Jewsiewicki 1981: 547)

Anyone reading the Preface to the series by UNESCO’s Director-General,

or
sceing Diop's essay in position of honour in Volume II, might suppose
that his ideas were central to debate on African history. But neither of the
two historiographical essays in Volume I, by J.D. Fage and Philip Curtin, so

much mentioned
as
Diop.
Contrasting with this m its turn, a contribution by Obenga on sources
and techniques adopted a predictably Diopian perspective. Obenga claimed

‘striking analogies’ and ‘structural affinities’ between Egyptian hieroglyphics

and the pictograms or ideographs used by some half-dozen Sub-Saharan

peoples (the argument is essentially a summary of the one in Obenga 1973:

355-443). In the case of the Vai of Liberia an ‘undoubted causal connec-

tion’ was asserted (Obenga 1981: 79).'° Since most of these writing systems
are
thought be
of very recent
to date, the nature of the connection and the
meaning of the claim are obscure, to say the least. Trying to make a silk
purse out of a sow’s ear, Obenga half-admits the vast chronological gap, but

suggests that this shows

the longevity of the impact

remarkable of Egypt. Egyptian writing, which

supposedly disappeared in 394 of our era, is seen to have had an unbroken

series of revivals between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries .., the
two are linked by an underground stream.’ (ibid.: 79)

He admits (as Diop would not) that the search for a common ‘cultural
macro-structure’ between ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa ‘is, properly
speaking, a matter of guesswork and awaits formalproof’ (ibid.: 80-81),
and elsewhere that ‘it: might be scientifically possible to reconstruct the
common predialectical ancestor of all these ancient and modern languages’
(1992: 157; emphasis added), but there can be no doubt what he wants to

find,
The other Diopian contribution to Volume I is from Pathé Diagne, one
of Diop’s very few direct disciples among Senegalese scholars. His chapter
on ‘Historical Linguistics’ offers what seems to the non-specialist a fair and
competent introduction to the field, but then swoops off into a serics of

highly contestable assertions. gulf between

He tries to smooth over the vast

Diop and Joseph Greenberg on Africa’s linguistic map by suggesting that in

some obscure ways they were ‘in perfect agreement’ (Diagne 1981: 241).
Like Obenga, but perhaps less guardedly, he proclaims the ubiquitous
Egyptian influence: there was not just similarity but ‘unity’ between hiero-

glyphics and other African writing systems in their ‘ideological presupposi-

tions’ (whatever that means) and ‘the technique of transcription’ (ibid.
251). Diagne’s underlying assumptions are those of unanimism, and of a

precolonial Africa marked by general social peace and harmony. He appears

even to be arguing that, in these idyllic circumstances, Africans made litle
 186 AFROCENTRISM

use of writing simply because they had less nced of it than less fortunate

people. Theirs was:

an affluent rural society and economy. Its members were not forced by the

pressures of poverty to consolidate in their own

age their material or

acquisitions, because
intellectual these were not continually threatened, An

ecology providing an easy balance between resources and population gave

most African civilizations and their cultural features the power to wax and
wane
geographically while always preserving their essence: their principles.
(Diagne 1981: 254-5)

Diop, then, certainly succeeded the issue of ancient

in politicizing Epypt,
if hardly in the way he might have intended. As Jewsiewicki pointed out

elsewhere, Diop ‘appropriated history as a battlefield’ (1989: 3). In his

circumstances and his time, there were
compelling reasons to do so. And

Diop himself fought that battle with usually rational tactics and some respect
—

however stretched at points -

for the agreed rules of engagement. The

pity is that so few of his followers have had the mtellectual will to vary the
combative stance or the tactics, to realize that in the 1990s the battlefield
has changed.
In the view of Kenyan philosopher D.A. Masolo,
Diop’s contribution must

thus be seen as
political
more than scholarly: ‘despite the controversics and

disagreements regarding his theses ...

(he) has contributed to a
major
focus of contemporary discourse —

the production of knowledge as a source

of power against (Masolo others’ opinion, Diop 1994: 19). But in Masolo’s
in the
~

together with Henry Olela, who has made somewhat similar claims

sphere of history of philosophy engaged in a ‘reductive argument’ by ~

propounding a wholly Egyptocentnic diffusionist view, as against the prefer-

able, earlier tradition of thought which proposed ‘parallel coexistence of
two separate but equal forms of reason’ (ibid.: 21).
Masolo extends his critique of Diop to Martin Bernal and others. While
Bernal’s ‘scholarly purpose deserves separation from the political mud’, this
is by no means truc of all Afrocentrists, whose

outbursts... frequently lack just what is required for discourse in a scholarly

framework the strengths of Afrocentricity,

, . . if any, lie in the political rather
than the scholarly domain, and have so far been presented in a manner that
is both uninteresting and unproductive. (ibid.: 23)

Non-specialists who have given attention to Diop have also tended to be

thoroughly even at —
times unfairly -

negative in their assessments. Kwame

Appiah, for his part, has no hesitation in consigning Diop’s thought to the
category of ‘romantic racialism’ (1992: 162). Robert Hughes is cqually
blunt: ‘Diop was a crank’, he snorts (1993: 134). In a standard reference
work on Senegal, Andrew Clark and Lucie Colvin Phillips tersely dismiss
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 187

Diop’s scholarship thus: ‘His historical work, while generally discredited,

has been influential’ (Clark and Phillips 1994: 111).
By contrast, Diop’s presence among Afro-American intellectuals has been
massive and
increasing.'® The initial however, in
contact, was
tnpromising
lengthy and justly celebrated view
the extreme. The young James Baldwin's
of the 1956 Présence Africae conference found room for only the briefest
and most scathing mention of Diop, who:

in sum, claimed the ancient Egyptian empire as

part of the Negro past. I can

only say that this has never

greatly exercised my mind, nor did M.
quesuon
succeed in least the direcuon he intended. He
Diop doing so —
at not in

quite refused to remain within the twenty-minute limit and, while his claims
of the deliberate dishonesty of all Egyptian scholars may be quite well
founded for all I know, I cannot say that he convinced me. He was, however,
a
great success in the hall. (Baldwin 1985: 57 the piece —

originally appeared
in Encounter, January 1957)

Almost certainly, this will have been the first mention Americans (apart,
perhaps, from tiny circles of Paris and Dakar residents) heard of Diop, and
for many years the only one. A long-winded, tendentious crank, obsessed
with an issue which Baldwin, self-consciously a
representative black Ameri-
can, thought irrelevant,
accusing and all and sundry of fraud —
such was the

image. It has even been suggested that these few lines of Baldwin’s were

responsible for the failure to translate any of Diop’s work into English
before the 1970s (Spady 1986: 90).
As the dates of translation English suggest, his
of Diop’s work into

reception in the Anglophone and

world for a long time
was indeed late,
limited. Few, even
among the Afrocentrists who were to adopt him uncriti-

cally, were aware of his writings before the 1970s. He knew little English,
and few among the African-American enthusiasts for ancient Egypt under-
stood French. His only visit to the USA took place less than a year before
his death, in April 1985. Then, though, Van Sertima claimed: "His coming
was like the arrival of an African President and he was received like one’

(1989: 328). His views politics, however, as expressed on that

of US racial
Atlanta trip, can
hardly have pleased his separatist and cultural nationalist
Afro-American fans, since reportedly he said: ‘I subscribe to the teaching of
Martin Luther King Jr. wholeheartedly’ (ibid.: 329; see also Van Sertima
and Williams interviews [1986] 296-9).
Latter-day Afrocentrists, as we shall see, lean heavily Diop’s work
on or —

perhaps rather, in the same way that Diouf and Mbodj had
complained of
some Senegalese writers doing, they lean on a few general theses drawn
from it and repeated, taken articles of faith, rather than
The criucism
as

which to be mounted
interrogated
is of Diop's
or

developed. only appears

failure to anticipate the preferred terminology of the Afrocentrists; a

complaint which is in essence anachronistic. Thus Victor O. Okafor faults

Diop’s use of the term ‘Negro’, his referring to the Egyptian Book ofthe Dead
188 AFROCENTRISM

rather than the Book of Coming Forth by Day, and to the label ‘Black Africans’,
since this last the Afrocentric dogma that ali Africans black, and
ignores are

thus into the hands of the Eurocentric to divorce northern

‘plays attempt
Africa, including Egypt, from the rest of Africa’ (Okafor 1991: 267).
have been above claims his
Diop’s Afro-American acolytes not making on

behalf which it is hard to believe he would actually have advanced himself,

such as the assertion Van Sertima puts into his mouth that ancient Egypt
was democratic (Van Sertima and Williams 1986: 326), or Charles Finch’s
Moses’s real have been
claim that Diop agreed with him that identity must
of Ra (Finch interview 1989: 371), Finch also
Osarsiph, an
Egyptian priest
secks to establish connections with the idiosyncratic American Afrocentric
tradition,asserting that while Diop, as a lonely student in Paris, was

beginning his Egyptian researches, he had a chance encounter with a man

who, unlike everyone else, encouraged and applauded him -

George G.M.

(ibid.: 372)! If this is true, it would the be a fascinating footnote to

James
history of ideas but Diop himself, —
in a 1976 interview, insisted that he had
no
knowledge of James’s Stolen. Legacy in the 1950s, and certainly mentions
no
meeting with the man (Moore interview 1989: 375-6).
enthusiast, Amon Saba Saakana, also
Diop’s most prominent British
obscurantist than those of his mentor.
proposed views considerably more
Whereas the Senegalese, as we saw, recognized that the wansmission of

knowledge only by oral tradition and secret initiation was a

major drag on

the development of scientific or critical thought, Saakana saw it as indicating

ancient Africa's moral superiority over both the Greeks and the modern
West:

Greece became the incubator for Western science, art and philosophy. But a

fundamental error was made in this claim: the concomitant social system was

nemical development of iremaniy. Instead

to the philosophy, like immoral
science itself, became attached to tyrannical governments. The fact that the
Western educational system did not
perceive of the ritual of initiation which
would guarantee the moral perfectibility of humanity before admission to

the higher phases of scientific knowledge can only be understood from the
themselves.... The omission and
materialist. proclivities of the societies
consequences of such ignorance continue to plague the world with wars,

nuclear disasters, ecological catastrophes, and the class system.... True

philosophy could never have been achieved in a society in which the king/
minister anchored in the ethics of cosmic
president/prime was never

thought. (‘Foreword’ in Obenga 1992: 15; original emphasis)

There is a fine irony here. Diopian and Afrocentric thought has frequently
seen Plato as the greatest villain of all, the father of Eurocentrism,
rationalism and matcrialism (for the most claborate argument on these

lines, see Ani 1994). Yet Saakana, in this passage, thinks that the ills of the
world are mainly due to our not being ruled by Platonic philosopher-kings!
Diop’s adherents produced —
as well as the numerous
appreciations and
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 189

exegeses, some of which have been mentioned —

two substantial volumes of

tribute after his death. One, edited by Ivan Van Sertima and Larry Williams,
is little more than a collection of panegyrics. special issue of
The other, a

Présence Africaine, though also uncritical and somewhat

overlapping with the
American volume, includes more intellectually interesting material, includ-

ing serious efforts to expand on Diop’s linguistic theories (notably Gilbert

Ngom’s attempt to demonstrate Egyptian—Douala parallels, resembling
Diop’s work on Wolof: Ngom 1989) and some substantial, enlightening
interviews with Diop himself. This special issuc, ‘Hommage a Cheikh Anta

Diop’, included contributions in both French and English; the former being
both the more numerous and the more substantial, since the English essays
were
largely pious meanderings by Diop’s rather eccentric band of Afro-
American disciples. There was, however, some feverish conjecture from the
Francophones too, like J-C. Bahoken’s thoughts on Dogon astronomy,
which would not have been out of place in the wilder reaches of American
Afrocentric ‘science’ (Bahoken 1989).
In that volume, Bernard Moitt claims —

oddly —
that criticism of Diop
‘is based Jargely on semantics rather than on concrete historical data’:
thus his theses still stand (Moitt 1989: 347). Moitt also urges the crucial
relevance of Diop’s view to the diaspora (ibid.: 354-60), though he
African
is notably vague about what ‘concrete historical data’ might be derived from
it for the New World, and takes refuge in a purely politico-psychological
claim. Diop is important ‘because Blacks in the diaspora face a constant
identity crisis and must inevitably seck answers and inspiration from their

past’ (360).
Daniel McCall, in one of the earliest English-language reviews of Diop,
drew on Isaiah Berlin's image of thinkers as
hedgehogs and foxes: the fox
knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one
big thing. Diop, McCall
suggested, was a
hedgehog: ‘Diop “knows” only one
thing that Negroes ...

invented civilization’ (McCall 1969: 134). In so far as Diop’s controversial

reputation has come almost entirely from this single idea, the judgement is
shrewd. But of course Diop knew many things, and perhaps tried to know
too many for the sake of his own reception and reputation. That reputation
might also have suffered because critics, particularly specialists in the fields
he ventured into, had been exposed initially (and perhaps only indirectly,
through hostile rumour or bricf dismissals like Baldwin's) to his more

polemical, often strident carly work. From that they ‘knew’ that Diop knew
only one thing, which was not even a true
thing. The more cautious, more

subtle, wider-ranging and far more

interesting if still deeply
—
flawed later ~

writings could therefore be ignored. If Civilization or Barbarism had been

Diop’s first or only book, instead of coming near the end of a long, stormy

progress, he might have been noted as an idiosyncratic but extremely

interesting metahistorian on the lines of Toynbee or
Spengler, rather than
dismissed as a crank. And he might have escaped the attentions of his
American Afrocentric friends, who have proved to be the worst enemies of
his wider repute.
 190 AFROCENTRISM

There is no doubt that a wider public consciousness of ancient history

would be desirable in Africa, for educational if not
good reasons even

necessarily the political ones Diop so stressed. African contributors to a

recent symposium on
archacology in education lamented the ancient past’s
lack of place in cither formal education or general popular awareness in
their countries (Nzewunwa 1990: Wandibba 1990), In a companion volume,
another archacologist expresses concern at how Nigeria's historical
muscums tend to reflect state ambitions and rivalries, highly localized and
ethnicized perceptions of the past rather than a wider historical conscious-
ness (Willett 1990). And numerous visitors to Egypt will attest how even

there, many ordinary Egyptians have highly attenuated or distorted ideas

about their country’s past including, in the present writer's
—

experience,
people who will, with equal vehemence, deny any affiliation to ether African
or Arab identities! What is to be doubted, however, is whether Diopian
mythmaking can help to remedy any of this in future, any more than it has
done in the past.
As for the world outside Africa, the story is at least as bleak. In 1973, Diop
lamented that ‘the conditions for a true scientific dialogue between Africa
and Europe do not
yet exist in the very delicate domain of the human
sciences’ Gray 1989: 60).
(quoted was
right, and he would still be
in He

right in the 1990s. The sad thing is that his own work and, even more, the ~

of it and for a racialized cultural

image spread by vulgarizers propagandists
essentialism —
has made that situation worse, not better.

Notes

1. Most astonishingly, he characterized the Laobe, a traditionally lowly Senegalese caste

of carvers of wooden utensils, as ‘dissolute’, promiscuous, mveterate ‘bellicose’,

thieves,
‘the norsiest and most socially undisciplined of all the Africans [ know’ (Diop 1974a: 188).
It is a repertoire of negative stercotypes redolent of the most extreme kinds of colonralist
scorn.

2. The politically academically unproductive Leonard

contentious and Jeffries had for
some time announced bemg at work on an English translation
himself as of this, but the
one which eventually appeared was by Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemt. Jeffries none the less
continues, im mterview, to clam much of the credit for the book’s US publication, as well
as for other projects with which bis name is not usually assocrated, such as Alex Haley’s
Roots (Person-Lynn 1996; 221-2, 228-9).
3, Other works worthy of notice include Diop’s major contribution to the field m which
he held his professional appointment, a treatise on radiocarbon dating cnuted Physique
nucléaire et chronologw absolue (1974b), and the pamphlet Philosophie, Science et Religion
(1985). The latter, evidently almost the fast text he composed, indicates his continued
involvement epistemological questions of the most general kind, his fascination
with with
new theories knowledge, and his aspiration to bring together philosophical, politcal,
of
scientific and theological discourses mto a new
synthesis. His /gyple ancienne et Afrique nore,

the republication m book form of a long 1962 article from the IFAN Bulletin (Diop 1962/
1989), 1s essentially another condensed version of his doctoral work.
4. See, however, Diop (1977: xxxvii), where he suggests that ‘the most ancient

prehistoric paintings found in Saudi Arabia, and reproduced in the Riyadh Museum,
reveal an Airican negro type without traces of admixture (méfissage)’ And in Diop
(1974a) he argued that all Arabia had much earlicr been part of a Kushite
—

empire. -
 CHEIKH ANTA DIOP 191

His sole source for this wild claim, apparently, was the fanciful latc-Vietorran French
historian of the Phoenicians, Francois Lenormant (Diop 1974a: 123-5),
5. Note, by contrast, how Samia Dafa’alla (1993) argues, with far more detailed

archacological evidence, that the royal succession m the Nubian kingdom of Napata was
a matrilineal
not matrilineal, Nubia, she suggests, may possibly have been society at some
earlier stage, but ceased to be so under Egyptran tmfluence. More generally, Diopian
claims that African societies were
generally or even universally matrilineal and/or
matrilocal cannot be sustained by the evidence. Patrilineal traditions, and those tracing
ancestry bilaterally, are widespread across Africa.

Diop’s discussion
6. (1991 and elsewhere) of the Greck debt to
Egypt relies primarily
on Diodorus of Sicily, and involves a
highly selective and forced reading of even the
limited evidence put forward, as Mary Lefkowitz (1996a; 16-22) and others have shown.
The substantially more claborate arguments of Martin Bernal on the same theme are

debated below in Chapter 15.

7. Diop (1977; 161-384). Sce Antila (1989); Ehret and Posnansky (1982) for overviews
of histoncal linguistics; and Vansina (1990) for both explication of general principles and
application to Afmican studies. It may be noted that although
an
important, innovative
Diop's and his disciples’ views on the origin of African languages and Martin Bernal’s —

on those of the eastern Mediterrancan have been judged particularly speculative and
—

endemic to the field

weakly grounded by specialists, a high degree of speculation remains
of historical linguistics. Certainly, to the non-expert, the theories of many more ‘main-
stream’ scholars, such as Colin Renfrew’s on
Indo-European origins (Renfrew 1987), seem
to melude much conjecture.
Diop specifies in one place that
8. he is not saying that Wolof descends directly from
Ancient Egyptian, but that ‘Egyptian, Wolof and other African languages derive from a

common mother language which one can call paleo-African’ (1977: xxv). Elsewhere he
seems less clear on this
pomt.
9.One US Afrocentric enthusiast, Charles Verharen, peculiarly describes Obenga's
presence at
Temple as prophetic turn of events’
‘a (1997: 487).
10. Gray (1989: 13). Obenga (1973: 223-37) discusses methodological questions in
historical linguistics, while Gray (ibid.. 92—104) gives a clear, though uncritical, summary
of Obenga’s main claims in this sphere.
11. Although there has been mereasing awareness of Diop’s ideas among Anglophone
Africans, especially in Nigeria (see, for mstance, Ghinweizu [1987], and several articles
and comments in the influential magazine West Afra since the late 1980s), | know of only
one substantial historical monograph by an Anglophone African which acknowledges
Diop as tts major influence: Amadiume (1987).
12. More recently Bassey Andah, perhaps the leading black African archaeologist, has
shown no
sign atall of any Diopran mfluence, Even in the course of what might ina broad
sense be called Afrocentric arguments, asserting the need for a more indigenously based
understanding of African prehistory, less dependent on European models, he makes no
reference to the views of Diop or his disciples (Andah 1995a, b).
13. As we have seen, the more recent evidence from physical anthropology, presented
by Keita, Brace, and others, supports the majority Cairo view.
14. See also Hilliard (1994a: 140-42); Ampim (1904: 191-2), which similarly seek to
present the debates as ending in total victory for their hero.
15. This, agam, is a paraphrase of the claims im
Obenga (1973), though in the earlier
work Obenga had qualified the assertion: “/1 all probability, there exists a causal connection,
that is to say a necessary relation, between the Egyptian hicroglyphs and Vai wriung’
(1978: 416; emphasis added). In fact the idea of such a connection
appears highly
the 1830s Duwalu Bekele,
implausible. The Vai script. was apparently mvented in by one
whose virtually single-handed development of a quite original form of writing 1s surely an
African mtellectual feat far more worthy of celebration than any supposed subterranean
influence from ancient Egypt. A few of the signs in Bekele’s script, each of them
representing a syllable, were hieroglyphs (just one of them, apparently, resembling the
word), but many more obviously derived from
Ancient Egyptian sign for the same were
192 AFROCENTRISM

of the Vai have been by African-

the Laun alphabet. The first detailed study seems to

American diplomat George W. Ellis in 1914, He novelty and originality of

emphasizes the
Bekele's scnpt, and makes no suggestion of (Ellis 1914: 262-5).
Egyptian influence
16.Some of the many African-American exercises in
repeating or more rarely ~ —

separately below. Others include Jean (1991),

developing Diopian ideas are discussed
Finch (1990); Crawford (1996); Gordon (1991); Karenga (1982); Okafor (1997); Ver-
haren (1997); several contributions to Karenga and Carruthers (1986); and many of the
chapters m Van Seruma and Williams (1986) and Van Sertima (ed.) (1989). Substantial
critical discussion of Diop’s work has, as we have scen, been far rarer: useful, though bricf,
instances of such discussion are Froment (1991); Holl (1995).
 15

Martin Bernal

The Afrocentric interpretation of history gained more attention than ever

before with the publication in 1987 of the first volume of Martin Bernal’s
Black Athena. As one critic quite plausibly suggests, it ‘must be the most

discussed book on the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean world

since the Bible’ (Liverani 1996: 421). There were several reasons for the

unprecedented level of interest and controversy. Bernal, unlike most of the

publicists who previously had was already a well

argued on similar lines,
established, distinguished, figure within the academy
even long a Fellow —

of King’s College Cambridge, latterly a professor at Cornell University. His

reputation, admittedly, had been acquired not in Egyptology or classical
studies but in the study of China and Vietnam (though he recently said that
he turned to this only because at Cambridge in the 1950s it was impossible
to specialize in Africa, as he would otherwise have wished to do from the
start [Bernal 1994: 101~2]). None the less, when he moved from the mid
1970s onwards to ancient history he achieved a command of the literature
and of the relevant languages which enabled him, far more than earlier
Afrocentrists, to argue with mainstream classical scholars on their own

ground —

even if some insist on

describing him as an ‘amateur’ (e.g.
Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996: ix), and cast implied doubt on his credentials -—

as Mary Lefkowitz's
phraseology says does when she that Bernal ‘claims he
knows other languages’ (1996b; 12). His work appeared in ‘estab-
ancicnt
lished’ academic journals, and Black Athena itself, originally issued by a small
radical independent press, was soon republished in the mass-market Vintage
paperback series, an
imprint of the multinational conglomerate Random
House.

Undoubtedly the drama of the story Bernal tells (and, critics add, the
excessive dramatization of his way of presenting it) also help to account for
the book’s impact. As Molly Myerowitz Levine suggests, Black Athena is
structured like a detective thriller:

every clement in the enormously complex plot meshed perfectly to create a

story with good guys (Herodotus, Egyptians, Semites) and bad guys (Aryans,
racist German philologists); in which the hero-author, the indefatigable

1Q2
194 AFROGENTRISM

neophyte detective, rereads the files and reworks the clues to uncover the
truth that
long been covered had up by a
contemptibly corrupt and lazy
police department (contemporary classicists). (Levine 1992a: 459-60)

It is a matter of contention, especially among African-American writers, how

much Bernal’s fame owes to another factor: unlike almost all previous
Afrocentric historians, he is white. He himself seemed to regard it as
extremely significant:

[I]f were
a to say what
Black Iam now
putting in my books, their reception
would be very different. They would be assumed to be one-sided and partisan,
pushing a Black nationalist line, and therefore dismissed. My ideas are still
so
outrageous that am convinced that if I, as their proposer did not have all
the cards stacked in my favour, I would not have enjoyed even a first hearing.
However, being not only white, male, middle-aged, and middle-class but also
British in America, has given me a tone of universality and authority that is

completely spurious. (Bernal 1989: 20)

Bernal’s argument is, in essence, extremely simple and quite familiar to

anyone who had read Diop or the generations of carlicr

several Afro-
American romantic antiquarians.' Greek civilization was massively indebted
to African and Asian influences, primarily to the Egyptians and the
Phoenicians. It is clear to Bernal, moreover, that not only the culture but

part of the actual populations of ancient Greece derived, through coloniza-

tion, from Egyptian and Semitic sources. This view of Greek origins, which
Bernal calls the ‘Ancient Model’, accepted
was by all the classical Greek
writers themselves. Until the late cighteenth century, it was also accepted by
almost all European writers on the ancient world. Later rejection and, —

indeed, suppression —

of the ‘Ancient Modcl’ was the result of racism, which

gave rise to a substitute and entirely false ‘Aryan model’ of Greek history
which remains dominant even today. It had several strands, but centred on

the romantic, racialized nationalism which took root, above all in Germany,
around the time of the French Revolution. Philhellenism, or a romantic
love of Greece, dictated commitment to the idea that Greek civilization was

original, autonomous, creative, dynamic —

and while, taking its inspiration

from the north, not the south or ecast.2 The simultancous rise of anti-black
racism led mainstream scholars to deny any Egyptian influence on Greece,
though a Phoenician presence was still admitted: this was the ‘Broad Aryan
Model’, dominant in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.
The later rise of anti-Semitism, again cspecially in Germany, led from the
1880s onwards to the ‘Extreme Aryan Model’ denying Phoenician as well as

fgyptian influences mostly because —

the Phoenicians were
supposedly a

‘Semitic’ people, uncomfortably close to the Jews in language and culture.

Bernal, with the melodramatic touch which often marks his writing, calls
this ‘The Final Solution of the Phoenician Problem’. The Extreme Aryan
view not only denied what had been universally accepted by ancient Greeks
 MARTIN BERNAL 195

themselves, their huge cultural debts imposed massive distor-

to Egypt, but
tions on the history of language. These preserved the purity
racist scholars
of Greece's European roots by dreaming up an
imaginary language, ‘Proto-
Aryan’, from which Greek supposedly descended: whereas actually, Bernal
argues, up to half of all Greek words, as well as most of the Greek myths,
came from Egyptian and Phoenician sources."
Today, Bernal believes, there is a partial shift back from the ‘Extreme’ to

the ‘Broad’ Aryan Model, with Semitic contributions to Greck development

once
again admitted. This, like the earlier changes, is a consequence of

political rather than academic factors: it results from the post-Holocaust

discrediting of anti-Semitism and the efforts of Jewish scholars (Bernal’s
tendency to ‘read off historians’ views from their ethnic origins has, as we

shall see, been much criticized). Now a further reassessment is overdue: a

realization that the ‘Ancient Model’,

emphasis with its on
Egyptian roots of
classical civilization, was inright all along. This
essence requires certain
revisions, notably a
recognition that Egyptian and Phoenician colonization
of Greece started carlier than once thought, and that there were also
invasions from the north, though their cultural significance was small —

but

basically, the wheel of scholarly orthodoxy must turn full circle. The result
will be to ‘rethink the fundamental bases of “Western Civilization”’ (1987:
2), and ‘lessen
European cultural arrogance’ (ibid.: 73). Later Bernal made
the political point even more strongly, saying that demonstration of Greek
culture’s African and Asian roots ‘would have a fundamental and to my
mind beneficial effect on not merely the peoples of South West Asia and
North East Africa but also those of the rest of the world including Europe’
(Bernal 1992: 213)."
It will be seen that of the two main claims involved in Afrocentric views of
the world of Antiquity —

that ancient Egypt was a black African civilization,

and ancient Greece an
ungrateful, derivative legatce of Egypt's achicve-
ments ~
Bernal’s focus is overwhelmingly on the latter, whereas Diop and
others had mostly been interested in the former. He discusses earlier

furopean views on the relationship between Egypt and Ethiopia, but only
bricfly and in rather noncommittal fashion (1987: 243-5). He has indeed
been criticized by otherwise approving commentators for neglect of Egypt's
Africanness: for not noticing that the Aryan Model’s African counterpart
has also been demolished (sec, for instance, Davidson 1987), or
simply for

failing to say anything substantial about Egypt’s relations to the rest of Africa

(Baines 1996: 32). Bernal does, however, appear broadly to accept the

Diopian perspective on
Egypt too, notably through his belief in -

indeed,
what he himself calls his ‘elaborate effort to resuscitate’ -
the idea that the
‘black Pharaohs’ Sesostris and Ammenemes undertook far-reaching con-

quests across much of the then known world (Bernal 1991: 524). (The
elaborate effortpp. 187-273 of ibid. Reasons
comprises for scepticism about
it are rehearsed, enter alia, in Yurco [1996: 72-6], Tritle [1996: 310-13]).
Bernal’s work has, of course, been intensely controversial, on both
evidential and political grounds.? Perhaps the sharpest, as well as most
196 AFROCENTRISM

thoughtful, extended critique of Black Athena’s political implications came

from Molly Myerowitz Levine. Calling it an ‘interesting and dangerous
book’, she identified the danger in Bernal’s ‘very nineteenth-century focus
and race’ (Levine 1992a: 450). Bernal’s stress origins, the
on origins on on

ethnicity of the scholars he discusses as well as of the peoples of Antiquity,

led to the abuse of history both by Bernal himself and by some readers:

[H]e seems to take it as

given that the ethnic group you were born in —

Jewish, WASP, African American —

greatly determines both what you claim as

‘objective conclusions’ and your reception or rejection ,..

by the academy.
(ibid.: 451)

This tendency in Bernal himself had been taken up by ‘Radical Afrocentr-

ists’ who have misused his work to renew ‘claims for the irredeemable
unreliability of “European” historiography’, as well as for the ‘Blackness’ of
the ancient Egyptians (453). Such myths of origin are, in Levine's view,
‘profoundly ironic, for they painfully recall the zealous excess with which
nineteenth-century Europe appropriated and remade ancient Grecce in its
own “Aryan” image’ (456). Such views tend, she thinks, to fuel a new racism

which, following Shelby Steele (1990), she sees as a direct response to the

‘politics of difference’. Levine’s position, though, seems

own rather ambiva-
lent. On the one hand she laments Bernal’s politicization of scholarship;
but on the other, hers is itself clearly and dcliberately a
political interven-
tion. To invoke Shelby Steele as she does is evidently to take sides —

the
conservative side —

in current US politics,
political arguments over race

affirmative action, and so on, Her foregrounding of

allegation that Bernal’s
racial issues ‘may inhibit many who differ with him from speaking out, lest
they, too, be labelled racists’ (ibid.: 445) is surely unfair as a
general
accusation; even if, at times, Bernal does seem disconcertingly free with the
‘racist’ label, as in his astonishing description of Colin Renfrew’s ideas as

having ‘racist overtones’, or of Gordon Childe as

‘thoroughly convinced of

Aryan racial superiority’ (Bernal 1991: 67).° Elsewhere (Levine 1992b) she
urged that contemporary classicists must adopt a more multiculturalist

approach, setting Greece and Rome in their Mediterranean context,

including Africa and Asia: both because it is a more historically inclusive

view, but also because if the professionals don’t do it, ‘the wrong people’
(ie. the Afrocentrists) will.
If Levine’s
charge is that Bernal makes too much of the contemporary
political implications of his views, Robert Young's case is that he says too

litle on the matter, Black Athena, Young argues, maintaining ‘insists on a

sphinx-like silence about its own relation to today’s contemporary cultural

politics’ (Young 1994: 158). This is indicated above all in Bernal’s reticence
about the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians. they If were not black,
says Young, then Bernal’s entire wider politico-cultural argument collapses
(ibid.: 157), Showing that one
group of ‘whites’, the Grecks, were not

rather, other ‘white’ the

culturally original but, dependent on two peoples,
 MARTIN BERNAL 197

Egyptians and the Phoenicians pseudoJews), (or would do nothing to

‘lessen European cultural arrogance’.’ Two quite distinct negative argu-
ments were made by Euro-racist scholars about Egypt: that it did not

influence Greece, and that its peoples were not ‘black’, not truly African.
Bernal according to Young
—
the second, ~
remains
underplays ambiguous
about its
implications, and fails entirely to address the issue of what it might
mean to call an ancient people ‘black’ when this label itself is so very much
a modern, political term (ibid.: 159-61). In his history of politicized
scholarship on classical civilizations, Young points out, Bernal omits to note

the major role nineteenth-century American writers played in asserting the

whiteness of the Egyptians, and how closely this was tied to justifications for

slavery (ibid.: 160-65; Young [1995: 124-33]). Yet Bernal’s very title invokes
all these arguments, and depends for its force on allusion to them,

Black Athena's title is itself, then, a troubled matter. Bernal has acknowl-

edged that this is a ‘critical issue’, and asserted that although he did

originally suggest it, he then wanted it changed. ‘However, my publisher

insisted on retaining it, arguing: “Blacks no longer sell. Women no longer
sell. But black women stil] sell”’ (Bernal 1989: 32). This sounds engagingly
honest, though it is therefore a
puzzling that
touch Bernal also used the
title with which he says he was so
unhappy for his 1985 article in the Journal
of African Civilizations (Bernal 1985), and apparently for a Cornell lecture
series he conducted over several years. On the other hand, he has given
more attention to the
problematic meanings of ‘blackness’ than Young
albeit mostly m replies to volume criticism
appeared, since his first
suggests
—

and in rather inconsistent ways. In his

expressed scepticism first volume, he
about ‘the utility of the concept “race” in general’ (1987: 241), argued for
the mixed character of the Egyptian population (ibid.: 241-2), repeated his
insistence that ‘Egyptian civilization was fundamentally African’ (242), but
said that this issue was ‘not relevant to our
present discussion, which is
concerned with the ambiguities in the perceived “racial” position of the

Egyptians’ (ibid.). In his Arethusa response to critics, he a

appeared within
couple of pages both to claim that the ancient Egyptians were ‘black’ and to
assert the inapplicability of racial terminology to the ancient world (Bernal
1989; 30-31). In the second volume of Black Athena, he frequently referred
to certain Pharaohs, notably Sesostris, and mythic figures possibly asso-
ciated with them, as ‘black’, in ways that left it unclear whether this was

because all Egyptians should be considered so, or because they probably

came from the south of Egypt or from Nubia (1991: 259, 261-2, 268, 271,
524, 587 n.95, 590 n.160). Bernal refers, indeed, to the ‘Deep Southern
of the 12th-Dynasty pharaohs’ (ibid.: 268), which makes it sound
origin
very much as
though he has Memphis, Tennessee more than Memphis,
Egypt in mind. He associated the putative Egyptian conquests with reports
of ‘black’ populations in Turkey at various times (ibid.: 249-50); while his
references to Sesostris's alleged conquering host as a ‘civilized African

army’ (25), ‘many of whom were Black and led by a prince who was Black’
(268), seemed strangely overinsistent, in the ways we have already noted
198 AFROCENTRISM

among historians who evince an insecure and surely unnecessary compul-

sion that Africans be historical actors. He noted the
‘prove’
to can

complications involved with ‘Ethiopians’ the identification of “Blacks’ and

in the ancient world, without apparently pausing to reflect on the problems
of his own language in this sphere (251-7). John Baines puts the general
objection very clearly: Bernal’s procedure ‘seems inappropriate to any
society that does not have an
overriding obsession with race; it appears thus
to suffer in reverse from the defects Bernal sees in classical scholarship’
(1996: 32).
The historiographical framework proposed in Black Athena has been
criticized on numerous grounds. Its view of cighteenth- and nineteenth-
century intellectual history may well be thought schematic and Manichaean.
Some believe that it is simply naive (c.g. Lefkowitz 1996b: 14). Bernal’s first
volume enurely omitted the most influential figure of all in archacology in
the early twentieth century, Oscar Montelius: an omission he remedies very
perfunctorily in Volume 2 (1991: 66), without
admittinghow seriously
1. Bernal’s
it
distorted the entire historiographical picture drawn in Volume

strong diffusionism has, as we have already noted, been thought excessive

and thoroughly old-fashioned.
specialists Most the consider his claims about
nature and extent previous scholarly generations simplistic and
of racism in

exaggerated. Arguably, Bernal concentrates too closely on nineteenth-

century German scholarship which he sees as
especially heavily imbued
—

with racial assumptions and too little on the British

—
role in revaluing
Greece." The main impetus for the latter was perhaps not so much directly
or overtly racial as it was on notions of Athenian democracy: but also of
Athens as
anperial democracy. The multiple strands of argument involved in

positive images of Athens retain their variety and their considerable weight
today, as is suggested in different ways in writings by Vassilis Lambropolous
(1993) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1989), with their particular concern to

defend a notion of Greek originality; or

by Robert Young's claim that the
discourse of Hellenism is one indicator of the continued hold of racialized

thinking (Young 1995: esp. chs 3, 5). Bernal’s focus, then, is too narrow,

and too inclined to see a

directly racist. motivation for intellectual revisions

(a tendency reinforced by what Levine rightly sees as Bernal’s disconcerting

habit of
crudely adducing scholars’ views from their ethnic background). It
might be more important and to trace how, in fdirect or covert

the discourse of Greck

compelling
and, indeed, of Greek and
ways, origins —

civility
democracy —

fed into, was inflected by, and itself shaped racial and colonial
ideas of ‘the West and the rest’.
I am
qualified to offer judgement
not on Bernal’s reading of the

archacological, linguistic and other evidence, which involves technical skills

and a command of ancient languages which I do not possess.'" Indeed,
Levine suggests that the sheer of Black Athena’s concerns means that
range
‘it requires a committce to review Bernal properly’ (1992a: 445). In any
of this evidence to be contained Volumes 3 and
case, significant parts are in

4 of his mammoth project, which have not yet appeared at the time of
 MARTIN BERNAL 199

writing. Much of the debate among classicists, as

opposed to the wider
political controversies over Black Athena, has inevitably revolved around such

questions of evidence. Here it seems to the outsider that some aspects of his
work have been significantly faulted by experts."!
Some classicists’ circles simply dismissed Black Athena. several major
periodicals in the field appear not even to have reviewed it, while The
Classwal World treated it to a bricf, savage notice saymg that Bernal had

clearly formulated his ‘swange conclusions’ before he had done any

research, and that the book was ‘only a strident, revisionist, political
pamphlet’ (Sawas 1989: 469-70). Bernal and his supporters would, of
course, respond that this represents at least in part the defensiveness of an
enclosed professional guild unwilling to see its ideological assumptions,
many of them reflecting disreputable inherited racial ideologies, chal-
lenged. Indeed, Bernal had anticipated such defensiveness in the very first

pages of his first volume, and built this into the very heart of his argument
throughout.
Bernal, though, seemed more concerned at the failure of the New York
Times, Time, Newsweek, the London Times, Independent, or Times Literary
Supplement to give due attention to the book. He hints heavily at a
racially
charged conspiracy of silence (1991: xvii-xxii). In fact some of these cither
devoted feature-page notice to Bernal’s views, or reviewed the second
volume (and thus Bernal’s general thesis) at some length. Certainly the
book has been far more widely discussed in the non-specialist media than
any other work about ancient history for decades. Its author's complaints
verge on the megalomaniac.
Bernal’s use of archaeological evidence has been much criticized —
not

Icast for his alleged failure to take account of a full range of relevant
fieldwork (Morris 1996; Vermeule
1996; Yurco 1992; Tritle 1996; Lefkowitz
1996b). His linguistic arguments and proposed new
etymologies suggesting
‘massive’ infusions of Egyptian and Semitic words into Greck have been
subject to perhaps the most ferocious assault of all: ‘a model of tendentious
confusion ..,
misguided speculations of ... the most extravagant kind ...

an almost complete disregard for phonetic consistency ...

simply false’

(Jasanoff and Nussbaum 1996: [87, 189-90, 191, 195). His chronological
framework, involving earlicr dates for various phenomena than those most
specialists prefer, has also come under highly sceptical scrutiny (Baines
1996: 36-7; Yurco 1996: 68~72, 86-9). His assertions about the character of
ancient Egyptian science and its influence on Greece have been judged
almost entirely wrong by once specialist (Palter 1996a), while his observations
op the historiography of the same
subject are described as based on

‘ignorance and superficial understanding’ (ibid.: 214).

Almost no one else in the field seems to find Bernal’s belief in an
Egyptian
colonization of Greece plausible. As Baines says, Bernal’s model ‘requires
Aegean societies to have assimilated and retained influences from abroad
across changes that would have left those influences without meaning for
the actors’ (1996: 38). David O’Connor (1996) and Lawrence Tride (1996),
 200 AFROCENTRISM

summarizing the evidence -

or near-total lack of it -

that might support the

idea, find the Black Athena case for colonialism entirely speculative and
unconvincing. There is, ironically, rather more evidence for Greeks visiting
Egypt. at the time of the 18th Dynasty, than vice versa (O’Connor 1996:
54—6). Where the
Egyptians did undoubtedly conquer and colonize, as in
Nubia, the archacological record of their presence and cultural influence is
substantial. For the Aegean, nothing comparable exists: though experts
seem to agree that there are better reasons for secing Egyptian influence
on the Mycenaeans than on carlier Greek cultures (Yurco 1996: 89-95).
Ungenerously, one
might note that some
peripheral matters, like even

the misspelling of several names in his list of

Acknowledgements (1987:
xvi-ii), do not inspire total confidence in Bernal’s care in handling more
central ones. More
importantly, may one
register what scems, on
general
principles, a methodological flaw running throughout Black Athena: the
striking contrast between the vigilant ideological suspiciousness marking his

reading of alf classical scholarship from the eighteenth century onwards,

and the absence of such vigilance in his treatment of the ancient sources

themselves. The modern writers are set in their sociopolitical contexts,

tirelessly interrogated for ideological bias, and, as we have noted, often have
their scholarly dispositions interpreted in terms of their ethnic origins. The
ancients are treated as various—
critics like John Baines and Tamara Green
have complained (Baines 1996; Green 1989) with what seems, by —

comparison, like remarkable indulgence or naivety. Texts are read

sources for factual statements, relatively unencumbered by considerations
of ideology, interest or narrative strategy even texts whose status has long
—

been generally recognized as highly problematic in these respects, like that

of Herodotus. Valentin Mudimbe, who is in general highly sympathetic to
Bernal’s aims, thinks him insufficiently critical of Herodotus's pronounce-
ments, and reminds us of the Greek historian’s tales of dog-headed men,
headless people with eyes on their chests, people with no names, and so on.
“What is the credibility of such a
presenter?’, asks Mudimbe with suitable
scepticism (Mudimbe 1994: 97). It might well be more productive, as the
French historian Francois Hartog argues with particular force, to see the
of Egypt in Herodotus and other Greek writings not as the subject of
figure
empirical statements to be accepted or
rejected on evidential grounds, but
as a
stereotype, a
paradigm, a symbolic ‘Other’ by comparison with which —

indeed, against which the Greeks defined

—

their own culture (Hartog 1986,

1988). Yet Bernal, replying to critics, reasserted that we should indeed, as a

general rule, always be more sceptical about modern than about ancient
authors (Bernal 1992: 209).
Bernal’s treatment of Greek myth as historical evidence has come in for

particular criticism. Perhaps his most central argument is that the Greeks
believed themselves or at least, important parts of their population,
—

including various ruling families and ancestral heroes ~

to be descended
from Phoenician and Egyptian immigrants; and that they were correct in
this belief. Much of his evidence for this comes from Greek myths. Edith
 MARTIN BERNAL 201

Hall suggests that his

‘entire thesis rests ultimately on his argument that the
versions of certain myths preserved in some ancient literary sources contain
kernels of that nebulous entity, “historical truth”, and ought therefore to be
believed’ (Hall 1992: 184). Hall against
mounts several lines of attack this.
She claims that Bernal
distinguish between ‘objective’ and ‘subjec-
does not

tive’ ethnicity the Greeks’ —

real origins, and who they thought they were.

This may not be a wholly fair complaint: Bernal docs separate the two,

though not always entirely clearly. Replying to Hall, rather oddly, Bernal
first insisted that he was clear about the distinction, then that it didn’t
matter because allsubjective (Bernal 1992: 204-5)! More telling
ethnicity is
is Hall’s charge that Bernal’s handling of the sheer varicty of Greek myth is
inadequate: ‘Ministries of Ideology in every polis defined their subjective
ethnicity by tracing their forefathers’ genealogies in different ways’ (1992:
191); and for Athenians, this included claiming that they were indigenous,
whereas other Greeks had come from elsewhere. Bernal, then, allegedly
uses
specifically Athenian claims about others’ origins as evidence for what
all Greeks supposedly believed about themselves. He has been taken in by
Athenian propaganda, because ‘he believes in a
homogencous entity called
Greek Myth: he is constantly talking about What the Greeks Themselves
Believed’ (ibid.: 191).
Moreover, Hall thinks, Bernal drastically underrates the sheer fluidity of
ethnic claims
myth: in gods the way Greek keep changing and heroes their

supposed origins (1992: 193-5). Most damagingly of all, he is simply

‘unsophisticated’ about the multifarious social functions of myth symbolic, —

propagandistic, selfdefining, ritualistic, and so on. He wants us to accept

that myth can be winnowed the pure grain of literal historical
—
truth can

be extracted, and used as decisive evidence about Greek origins. It is an

impossible exercise, says Hall, and in Bernal’s hands results in an attempt to
replace one legend the Aryan one —

by another. Instead we —

should focus
on the ‘really important questions’ who did the Greeks —

¢hmk they were,

why did they think it, and why does the whole issue seem to matter so much
to us at the end of the twentieth century (ibid.: 198)?
In reply, Bernal claimed not only that many ancientGreck myths do
indeed contain historical truth, but that modern theorizing about the

multiple purposes of ancient

legends ‘has no of bearing on the question
their having, or having any historicity’
not (1992: 204). This does not seem

satisfactory. Can we really give proper recognition to all the ideological,

functional and fictive uses of myth, and still say blithely that alongside all
these, quite unaffected by them, there exists a
clearly separable core of
historical truth?
Elsewhere Bernal had appeared less confident about claims to clear-cut
historical truth, suggesting instead that he operated according to a modcl
of ‘competitive plausibility’ (1991: 4) in assessing rival accounts. This gave
rise to some caustic responses, with James Muhly saying that Bernal’s
approach was
certainly competitive, but not very plausible (quoted in Levine
1992a: 442), while Robert Pounder snapped that undergraduate term
202 AFROCENTRISM

papers are failed every day for indulging in ‘competitive plausibility’

(Pounder 1992: 461). Bernal, Pounder alleges, wilfully sets aside require-
ments on standards of historical evidence which are ‘not the twisted
constructs of evil German historians’ but as old Thucydides (ibid.: 463).
as

Josine Blok, similarly, finds that Bernal ‘has dropped several essential rules
of historical inquiry’ (Blok 1996: 724).
There is also an important, unresolved tension in Bernal’s work between
the ‘Africanist’ and the ‘Semiticist’ impulses. He has been claimed as an ally
by many of those
seeking to urge exclusively Egyptian origins identified in —

their wholly with black African

turn ones for Greek civilization; and has -—

appeared happy with that association. In this register, his work is linked with
African, and more
particularly African-Amcrican, cultural assertion; and of
course it is this vein in his writing which has attracted most attention and

controversy. But Bernal himself has seemed almost as interested in uncov-

ering Semitic influences on ancient Greece as African ones; and in Ais vein

his work is tied to a

resurgent Jewish and
especially
—
Israeli —

scholarship of
recent decades; and even, in directly political fashion, to the successes of

political Zionism. He himself has gone out of his way to emphasize this too,
as well as the ‘scattered Jewish components’ of his own
ancestry (1987: xiii);
even
though he has also stressed the importance as intelectual influences
on him, and on the revived ‘Ancient Model’, of non- or anti-Zionist Jewish
scholars like Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour (ibid.: 36, 415-16). In this

way Bernal is certainly less

single-mindedly Afrocentric
Diop, than who had
seen the Phoenicians as copyists of Egypt (see Diop 1991: 95).
mere

These two impulses of emphasis on

~
the one hand on
Egyptian, on the
other on Semitic or, more specifically, Judaic influences on Greece are —

naturally by no means incompatible within the logic of historical scholar-

ship. But in the contemporary cthno-political arena which, again, Bernai

himself is so eager to sce as
determining scholarly inquiry, they are very
much at odds. The ideologies of political Zionism and of Pan-African or

Afrocentric assertion, despite (or perhaps in part because of) their substan-
tial shared ancestry, have long been bitterly opposed. This is so not only in
the politics of the Middle Kast and Africa themscives where an association —

of Pan-Africanism with anti-Zionism, although it achieved its strongest

practical expressions three decades ago under Egypt’s President Nasser, has
a still
vigorous emotional life but perhaps still more
—
in North America,
where relations between blacks and Jews have become ever more
ideologi-
cally fraught! Bernal himself becomes ideologically uncomfortable only
when he has to concede that people who were neither African nor Semitic
ever achieved anything, as when he finds it ‘difficult to admit’ that the

Hyksos might have included some Indo-Europeans (1991: 359, and several
other similar grouches). His view of the character and significance of Hyksos
invasions themselves seems to have shifted several times. Frankly, I cannot
make clear sense of it.

noteworthy, and depressing,

It is that some of Bernal’s fiercest. critics —

especially, but not only, from within the Afrocentric camp

—

choose to make
 MARTIN BERNAL 2038

a point of identifying him as

Jewish. (In fact Martin Bernal’s immediate
ancestry includes Irish Catholics and American Presbyterians; his own recent

assertions of the him of

importance to having some Jewish ancestry are a

touch vague, and leave one

wondering just why he should choose to stress

them now.) Some of the difficulties here may be indicated in the terms of
a
critique of Bernal launched by Vassilis Lambropoulos, who is concerned
to defend Hellenism in modern culture against what he sees as a concerted
Hebraist assault.

Lambropoulos asserts, making a rather odd connection with a leading US

literary critic, that ‘Like Harold Bloom (who meticulously fashions himself
on Disracli’s Sidonia), Bernal presents himself as an outsider (non-classicist,
British Jew) ... ancl seeks exotic alliances’ (1993: 356). His is an
example of

‘positive use of ethnic origin for potentially dangerous race arguments’

(ibid.: 357). Lambr book s (an utterly The Rise of Hurocenirism
title: it
opoulos’
fact about
is in Hellenism), Hebraism
misleading versus though
hugely erudite, seems to me in effect complicit in what it analyses, having a
rather disconcerting subplot alleging a wicked Hebraist (or even Jewish)
conspiracy to calumniate the Greeks, which evidently and ironically, given -

the complaints Lambropoulos, and 1, make against Bernal owes more —

than a little to the author’s origins." Bernal is seen as

part of this trend, or
near-conspiracy. He is misrepresented as ‘arguing that the Greeks have
stolen everything from the Hebrews, or from the Orient in general. To
buttress this idea, Bernal resorts to sensationalism: he manipulates his

terminology according to audience demands; he plays the role of the

pariah; he conjures up enemies; he uses messianic language’ (Lambropou-

los 1993: 92 each item
-

on the charge-sheet is supported by extensive

endnotes, at pp. 355-7). More soberly, Lambropoulos suggests, with some
justice, that Bernal’s treatment of the ancient Greeks, also ironically, fails to
show due regard for dhe cultural specificity, or its attractions to later
scholars:

[H]e sees
every expression of interest in Greece as a
position for or against
the Ancient Model which he thinks had prevailed until then. It is as if every
Western view of Greece has been determined by one’s view of a Near Eastern
civilization.... The possibility that certain Westerners chose to look at

Greece because that culture appealed to them (rather than because they
were looking for ways of denigrating the others) is never entertained. (ibid.:
93)

Certainly the implication here -

that Bernal stereotypes his intellectual
opponents, and may wilfully overdramatize their differences in order to

present himself lonely as a warrior for truth and

decency —

has some basis.

Writing in his second volume of the Hyksos empire-building which (on

apparently questionable evidence) he believes to have occurred, Bernal

protests that he does not believe that ‘conquest or domination through

violence somehow makes a
people or
linguistic group morally or creatively
204 AFROCENTRISM

better (Bernal 1991: 360; original emphasis). Thus he encourages the

implication that all those who disagree with him do think violent conquerors
are morally superior: an implication he immediately reinforces by explicitly
—

and in my opinion scurrilously associating such a view, and his ‘Aryanist’

—

opponents, with the Nazi Shoah (ibid.: 360)! Lambropoulos’s other main
point, that Bernal fails to show any regard for Greek cultural specificity, and
the ancient (and, by implication, the modern) Greeks also has
maligns
—

some force, albeit of a rather ethnocentric kind, and has been echoed by
Mary Lefkowitz and others. But, again ironically, it can equally well be said
that Bernal’s model fails to indicate any interest in Egyptian let alone —

other African or Asian cultures in their—

own right. He is interested only in
their impact Greece, and thus Europe: his is, in the end, as
putative on on

Eurocentric a view as those he attacks.

In more
aggressive
—

and, indeed, nakedly antiSemitic ~

fashion, Tony
Martin writes of ‘Bernal, Jew, (who) was precipitously and prematurely
a

adopted by many Afrocentrists’ (Martin 1993: 57), and goes on to see

Bernal and his antagonist Mary Lefkowitz as
co-conspirators against
Africanism:

Lefkowitz and Bernal actually end up endorsing white supremacy, making a

for
possible ‘Semitic’/Jewish omgins of Western civilization and
pitch
denouncing Afrocentrism. When faced with the Lefkowitz challenge, Bernal
his potentially precarious Afrocentric throne in favour
preferred to abdicate
of ‘Semitic’ solidarity.’ (ibid.: 58)

Manu is not to Bernal’s supposed Jewishness, but

Ampim's objection more

simply to his whiteness. Ampim claims to identify a ‘Bernal—Davidson school’

of white interlopers into Afrocentric study. This ‘school’ of ‘outsiders’ (that
is, non-Africans), it is asserted, ‘undermines’ Afrocentric endeavour by
identifying ancient populations as racially mixed, and must
Egyptian be
‘checked’ before damage (Ampim 1994: 191, 192).
it docs further
Other Afrocentric attacks on Bernal and his book's reputation have been
more
scrupulous, if not necessarily more accurate, than Tony Martin's and
Manu Ampim’'s bigoted tirades. Some have centred mainly on the not
unreasonable complaint that Black Athena has gained massive international
attention, while a host of black writers who had —
often much earlier —
made
similar arguments were entirely ignored. Bernal, point of course, makes this
himself, albeit in rather cursory fashion apparently only the most
and with
limited knowledge or African
of prior Afro-American Egyptophile writings.
His failure to note s Civilization or Barbarism, whose final chapters raise
so many of the same
Diop's
issues as his own book, is especially regrettable. Bernal
makes vaguely approving reference to George James’s book Stolen Legacy,
and complains bitterly at the difficulty of getting it accepted into the library
at Cornell University but Black Athena —

says nothing whatever about the

substance of James's claims. In a later response to critics Bernal explicitly
distances himself from them, insisting: ‘At no pomt do I say or even suggest
 MARTIN BERNAL 205

“stole” his ideas the

that I accept James'sclaim that Aristotle from library at

Alexandria’ (Bernal 1989: 32).

Equally, however, it must be admitted that Bernal’s work is considerably
more
carefully documented and argued than any of the related studies by
black Afrocentrists, Diop not excluded. None the less, a racial clement in
the contrast between the media coverage and academic debate Bernal’s
book prompted and the obscurity into which many earlier works in similar
vein have fallen cannot be ignored. As Jacob Carruthers remarks:

For at least two hundred years, African champions of ancient Egypt have
been asserting what Bernal concludes about Kemet; now that a European
scholar has proclaimed it, the dialogue ... has been reopened. (Carruthers
1992: 462)

Carruthers, undoubtedly one of the more scholarly of the extreme

Afrocentrists, does
not deny that Bernal ‘has made a valuable contribution’
(1992: 462). His major criticism of Black Athena, perhaps surprisingly, is that
its is too overstated. Bernal direct Egyptian colonization of
case
emphasizes
Greece, whereas although colonies may have been established, they are not

cnough, in Carruthers’s view, to account for Egyptian influence there.

Instead: ‘the indirect impact of Egyptian civilization on tricontinental world
cultures over a sustained
period’, together with what Greek thinkers learned
from various neighbouring peoples, should be understood (ibid.: 465).
Bernal, suggests Carruthers, also understates the connections between

Egypt, Phoenicia, and the Mediterranean rim of Western Asia more

gencrally. For instance, one finds strong similarities between Mesopotamian

and Greek myths, which share elements ‘quite foreign’ to Egyptian beliefs
(466-7). Carruthers’s model of cultural
influence, then, is a far more

ecumenically multilateral one than Bernal’s, and would probably find more
acceptance in the academic mainstream, Carruthers, indeed, tends to mock

Bernal’s protestations of academic marginality: he is ‘the inside—outsider

trying to really get outside’ (471). Carruthers also finds Bernal’s treatment

of race deeply flawed, and is sceptical of his view that cither Christian views
the idea of should share the blame for
or

of
progress
the racial ‘science’
nineteenth-century
of the and
defamation Egypt. Instead, new era

Romanticism —

‘two sides of the same coin’, in Carruthers's view —

were the

culprits. Finally, Carruthers seems to accept that ancient Greek references

to people as ‘black’ by no means necessarily meant that they resembled
modern Zambians, any more than the Greeks themselves resembled modern
Swedes. Sensibly, Carruthers urges:

[T]he Kemites were as Black as the Greeks were White. I believe that the
ancient Grecks were
thoroughly Eurasian ...
many were dark complexioned.
some olive or bronze ...
[O]ur claim about the Blackness of the Kemites is
no more
outrageous than the European clam that the ancient Greeks were

white. Therefore, let us stop quibbling about what Herodotus meant ... or
206 AFROGENTRISM

what percentage of which dynasties were Black; or whether true Africans had
everted How inverted the lips of the ancient Greek?
lips. were average
(470-71)

It is only rather a
pity that Carruthers, after all this, appears to slip back into
a racial essentialism of his own with complaints that Martin Bernal ‘intrudes
into a two-centuries-old dialogue among African thinkers’ (474),
Frank Snowden, the veteran Afro-American historian of racial attitudes in
about Bernal’s racial categorizations. His
Antiquity, was even more
sceptical
if references Diop, said Snowden, failed to note how
respectful terse to
~ —

the Senegalese ‘distorts his classical sources’ and the strong objections his
theses had met at the Cairo conference (Snowden 1989: 89). Bernal’s use

of classical authors was also questioned:

there is in classical sources no

justification for equating ‘black’, as used by
Herodotus or any other Greek author, with peoples designated in classical
texts as
Ethiopians, (ic. Negroes) unless there is additional substantial
evidence to support such an
equivalence. (ibid.: 93)

The basis of Clyde Winters’s attack is somewhat different, and he evidently

has little time for the subtleties of a
Jacob Carruthers or a Frank Snowden,
Not only has Bernal gained far more than his due of publicity, but his case

on the one hand does not

go far enough, on the other contains errors on

which critics have fastened to discredit Afrocentrism, with which Bernal

should not really be associated. Bernal, according to Winters, sees the

Hyksos as the founders of Greek civilization (though this is not really an

accurate summary of his view), as

opposed to ‘Afrocentric scholars who

recognize that the founders of Athens and Attica were Blacks’ (Winters
1994: 176).
A quite different kind of complaint against Black Athena seems to me

more serious than any of these. Neither Bernal nor

any other writer who
can, however broadly, be grouped within the Afrocentric tradition appears
to be interested m the content of the ideas with which Pharaonic Egypt ts

argued to have influenced the world. Merely asserting the fact of such
influence to be enough. In relation to philosophy, which has been
appears
the most contentious extravagant
area and
Appiah site of the most claims,
is surely right ‘Diop whose work is clearly the best in the field
to that —
—

say
offers litle evidence that Egyptian philosophy is more than a systematised

but fairly uncritical folk-philosophy’ (1992: 162). And Appiah further

questions whether study of the earliest known philosophical thought,
whether it is conceived of as Egyptian or as Greek, is of major value to the
work contemporary philosophers do, for two reasons:

I think what matters are answers, not histories of answers... (and) it is

absurd to that because a
thought is African, and the prehistory of
argue
 MARTIN BERNAL 207

European thought lies in Africa, that thought will help us to understand

Western Thought. (ibid.: 161)

More significantly and damagingly still. in so far as we are

primarily
interested in the broad spheres of moral, social, legal and political philos-
ophy —

and evidently almost everyone

pretty involved in the controversy 2s

so concerned, than rather

being preoccupied with more abstract ontological
or
cpistemological questions it is by no ~
means evident that ancient

Egyptian thought has anything whatever to tell us. It presupposes an

intensely hierarchical society, based on

slavery and on certain persons being
divine while others are rightless. It has nothing to say about democracy,
equality, liberty, individual rights, the distribution of wealth and power; let
alone issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity or
ecology —

any of the questions

which mainly preoccupy modern socicties and those who seek to philoso-
phize about them."® Its presuppositions might be of value only to people
who are keen to re-establish theocratic and authoritarian politics: but then,
that is preciscly what some Afrocentrists so evidently do dream of. When
Molefi Asante seeks to summarize what he believes the world owes to ancient
Africa, only specifically political or social entry on his list is ‘the concept
the
of monarchies and divine-kingships’ (Asante 1988; 38). If, by this logic, we
wish to celebrate and revive the Divine Right of Kings, we should emphasize
our African heritage. And if not, not.
As Jennifer Tolbert Roberts's intriguing book Athens on Trial shows,
debate and dispute over ancient Athens have for many decades the best —-

part of two centuries been centred

-
on the issues of democracy and
freedom (Roberts 1994). More recently, it has finally been recognized that
those issues include, centrally, the rights of women; while the most ambitious
single recent contribution to (hose discussions has come from a black
Jamaican-born scholar, Orlando Patterson. It is noteworthy that Patterson's
monumental [reedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), identifying the
birthplace of modern conceptions of freedom as Periclean Athens, makes
no mention at all of
Egyptian influence for there is no sign that the carly
—

Greek stirrings of freedom and democracy owed anything to Egypt. And it

is because of its association with these ideas that Athens, rightly, has been
scen as important to all parts of the world and all ages. In so far as Bernal
has legitimated a debate which instead focuses entirely on the racial origins
of ideas, his is a regressive, reactionary step. Even Michel Foucault’s or

Kenneth Dover's interests in Athenian sexuality were framed by concern

over its relevance to

power relations, to ethico-political questions and to
rights. Bernal, ict alone his black nationalist supporters, has no such agenda.
For him, secimingly, race 1s all.

Martin Bernal has not been alone amony recent scholars in questioning
the Aryan and ‘isolationis’ models of Greek cultural development; though
few others have bent the stick so far the other way as he does. The Swiss
scholar Walter Burkert, in a book first published in 1984, translated into

English in 1992 -

ignored by Bernal (who reads German) in his first volume,

208 AFROCENTRISM

though extensively referred to in his second -

makes a related but

balanced polarity He, believes that of ‘Occi-
apparently more case. too, a

dent’ and ‘Orient’

hegemonic among classical
became scholars largely as a
result of late-cighteenth-century German writings: though it has its precur-
sors in Greek thought itself, arisimg from their conflict with the Persians
(Burkert 1992: 1). Even today it remains ‘difficult to undertake unprejud-
iced discussion of connections between classical Greece and the East ...

(without) entrenched positions, uneasiness, apology if not resentment’

(ibid.: 1). But in tracing Asian influences through such
on Greece fields as

craftsmanship (ch, 1), medicine and magic (ch. 2) and the parallels between
Akkadian and early Greek literature and myth (ch. 3), Burkert does not

conclude —
as the Afrocentrists do by presenting Greece
—
as a
wholly
derivative civilization:

[A] cultural continuum including literacy was created by the eighth century
[pcr] extending over the entire Mediterranean: it involved groups of Greeks
who entered intensive exchange with the high
into cultures of the Semitic
East. Cultural
predominance remained for a while with the Orient; but
Greeks immediately began to develop their own distinctive forms of culture

through an astonishing ability both to adopt and to transform what they had
received, Soon Greece was to take over the leading role in Mediterranean
civilization. (ibid.: 128)

Sarah Morris, a model

like of multiple influences
Burkert, across
proposes
the ancient Near
tending to stress Levantine
East, more than Egyptian
impact on Greek culture, especially in relation to the visual arts (Morris
1989, 1992, 1996). The increasing tendency among analysts of the ancient
eastern Mediterranean, southwest Asia and northern Africa is, on Burkert’s
and Morris’s lines, to see multidimensional interaction between peoples —

genuinely ‘multicultural’ model quite unlike either the largely discredited

Eurocentrism which Bernal assails or the Egyptocentric version he seeks to

put in its place.

In somewhat more muted vein than Bernal, and without quite his

sweeping claims about modern writers’ ethnic prejudices, a rather similar

message of the ubiquity of race emanates from the work of the Australian

political theorist Patricia Springborg. In Republicanism and the Oriental

Western
Prince (1992), a book which has been oddly and unjustly neglected by
comparison with the huge attention given to Bernal, Springborg covers
much of the same
ground as that traversed in Black Athena. She, too, is
concerned with the ancient history of relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’,
and sees modern racism which,
—

especially anti-Semitism
Springborg says,
‘affects all Semites, Arab stemming directly from
and Jew’ (ibid.: vii) —
as

the way ancient writers came to divide the world. Attitudes to race, private
property (whose supposed absence in the Orient was the key to despotism’s
triumph there) and a host of other key social issues were shaped according
to the basic antithesis between East and West.
 MARTIN BERNAL 209

Thatpolarization concealed the huge extent of Greek intellectual debts

to
Egypt, and the degree to which carlier Greek writers derived not only
their ideas about philosophy and history but their theories of government
from the Egyptians. Plato's Republic,Springborg argues, is based on Egyptian
models (ibid.: 94-115). Plato —

likeHomer, Hesiod, Herodotus and a host

of other early Greek writers origins lay
—

accepted that Greece's

and east

south, symbolized mythical founder-figures of Danaus

in the the Egyptian
and Cadmus the Phoenician. But these early beliefs, and images of wise and
benevolent non-European political systems, were later denied and con-

cealed in fabricated alternative myths of origin, and in the mythical,

demonized figure of the ‘Oriental despot’ which haunted all modern
Western thought and against which Western ideas of freedom and democ-
racy defined themselves. Perhaps the first full crystallization of such
antitheses came with Aristotle, whose defence of slavery rested on a racist
substratum asserting that while Greeks were and should be free, Asiatics
were natural slaves (ibid: 23—31).
The structure of prejudice was renewed in the Renaissance, this time with
the Islamic world as the main enemy and the negative pole of the antithesis.
This proves that, as
Springborg asserts, racism and its accompanying
stereotypes:

especially in that form of racial discrimination among the least understood

and most horrendous of our century, anti-Semitism, go back as far as

recorded history. Moreover ...

they have involved a tissue of distortions as

elaborately crafted, as embroidered with myth and romance, and as overlaid

with legal sanctions, as the fabric from which the control of sexuality is cut.

(288)

Like Bernal, Edward Said, Michael Astour and others, Springborg sees

herself as
engaged in an intellectual crusade to unravel that tissue of
distortions. The direct line she draws from ancient past to
present politics is
underscored by her note that her book was ‘concluded in the throes of a

war (that precipitated by lraq’s invasionreflecting the outcome

of Kuwait)
of the deep divide between East and West, as old as history itself” (vii), From
Socrates to Saddam, it seems, nothing ever really changes.

Notes

I. It should be noted, however, that not only grand plan of Bernal’s

the muluvolume
project, but important aspects of the argument, significantly between
shifted his first
vohune (1987) and his second (1991). Compare especially the ‘Introduction’ to Volume

1 with the ‘Preface’, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ to Volume 2. Some of the changes
announced are
puzzling -

including the one Bernal says ts most important of all. In

Volume 2 he proclaims ‘given up the mask of impartiality’ he previously
that he has

adopted, abandoned the ‘impartial competition I mistakenly thought possible when Ifirst
set out the scheme of this project’ (1991; 3, 61). Its hard to believe that any reader of
Black Athena's tivst volume can have gained the impression that Bernal was ‘impartial’ as
 AFROGENTRISM
210
between his ‘Aryan’ and ‘Ancient’ Models. Stull further shifts m
argument can be found in
various subsequent articles and responses to critics.

2. Bernal returns to this theme m 1994b, arguing that mages

his of a white, uniquely
creative Greece as fountamhead of knowledge and culture
all played a cructal role in

legiimating European colonial expansion. Somewhat similar exercises to Bernal’s have

begun to emerge in other areas of ancient history, such as Keith Whitelam’s ideological
critique (1996) or biblical studies and Middle Eastern archaeology, which, he argues, have
robbed the Palestinians of their past through near-cxclusive focus on the origins of ancient
Israel.
3. Some of the evidence for this 1s presented in Black Athena’s second volume (Bernal
1991); more ts
promised in two further volumes. The parts of 1 so far available have

already been subjected to powerful cntucism, notably m Jasanoffand Nussbaum (1996).

4. Since so much argument in this sphere has involved claims or
assumptions that the
character of Greek and
classical Roman civilization has nmmense emotional resonances

for the present, F should perhaps say here that F (as a middle-class white European) have
never
consciously felt engaged by this issuc. | yawned my way through schoollevel Latin,
never even considered learnmg ancient Greek, and the only examination I have ever

failed in my life was a Latin translation exercise at Oxford. Latterly I have been frankly
bored by teaching Plato and Aristotle in courses on the history of politcal theory, and
(I'm more ashamed to admit) have almost never felt any urge to read classical authors for

pleasure. Whoever the Europeans are who are

supposed to have a
profound ideological
investment in the classical inheritance, iCaim’t me.

5. Much of the most important criticism is collected in Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996),
together with some new articles. That volume’s Bibliography traces most of the history of
the controversy, though it misses some
important contributions, like the books by
Lambropoulos and Sprmgborg, discussed below. [It notes 67 reviews and responses on

Black Athena's two volumes so far.

many of them lengthy review essays and symposta, while
by my reckoning Bernal has the time of writing published
at fifteen separate extended
responses to criticism, not including published letters or the still-proliferating list of his
reactions Lefkowitz and Rogers, Among the important of these Bernal
printed to more are

(L990b, 1992, 1993a, b.)

6. Bernal has also -—
if anything more
peculiarly —

suggested that Renfrew's anti-

diffusionism stems from his support for the Brush Conservative Party, since the latter's
enthusiasm for small businesses parallels affection for the idea of numerous independent
ewilizauonai pioneers (Bernal [990b: 128)! He has even
suggested that Frank Snowden, a

disunguished Afro-American classicist, is a

prisoner of the racist Aryan model (1987: 477).
7. Mary Lefkowitz, similarly but more
briefly, complains that Bernal ‘ducked the issuc’
of whether Egyptians were black (1992: 35); while Frank Snowden has argued on several
occasions that Bernal’s statements on this issue are confused and misleading (Snowden
1989, 1996).
8. The profound ambiguity about what might be meant
by ‘black’ in Antiquity appears
again in Bernal 1991: 383-9,
9, See, for mstance, Turner (1989; 101-9); Palter (1996b: 359-64), which also suggest
that Bernal misrepresents the British classtcists he does discuss. It might further be noted
that in casting the Germans as
prime villas, Bernal unfairly overlooks the antiracist

tradition which also existed in German scholarship, to which Malgorzata Irck (1994) has

recently drawn attention. Trek is herself a Polish, not a German, writer, and thus hardly
likely to be ideologically predisposed towards pro-German apologetcs. Well-documented
arguments that Bernal oversimplifies, mistakes and/or misrepresents the views of erght-
eenth- and nincteenth-century German scholars, meluding Herder, Heumann and
Blumenbach, may be found in Palter (1996b) and Norton (1996). In relation to another

key early German classicist, K.O. Mueller, whom Bernal casts as a vehement racist

substantially responsible for discrediting the “Ancient Model’, Josine Blok has shown in

detail that the account of his ideas piven tn Black Athena is wildly distorung, ‘untenable im

the light of a sincere assessment of the source material’ (Blok 1996: 719).
10. Thus | have not discussed Black Athena's more purely technical offshoot, Cadmean
 MARTIN BERNAL 21]

Letters (Bernal 1990a), a treatment of the origins of the Greek alphabet. Its main structure
of argument is identical to that of the main project, relying on
‘competitive plausibility’
(1990a: 1), castigating the ‘Aryan model’, and proposing that Greek writing derived from
the Levant, from which it spread much earlier than most scholars have believed. Its

general case that the —

emergence of Greek literacy was earlier than

previously thought,
and substantially derived from the Near East -
seems to be accepted by many scholars,
which is to say that its not
parucularly tconoclasuc or (as several critics have noted)
orginal. On the other hand, there are
grave evidential problems with i, notably the
absence of any evidence for a Greek script before the eighth century sce (Tride 1996:
327).
11. See, for instance, the Arethusa special issuc of Fall 1989, the Journal of Mediterranean
Archaeology's 1990 review symposium, Levine (1992b); Pounder (1992); Donelan (1989),
and the various contributions to Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996), Among the relatively few
more or less approving classicists’ responses are Vickers 1987 =

calling 1a work of ‘very

great ment and lasting value’: 481); Rendsburg (1989) and Banham (1989). In the
Preface to his second volume, Bernal gives an account of critical reactions to the first. Any
author is likely to overstate the praise and understate the criticism which her or his own

work has recerved; but Bernal’s percepuon is unusually highly coloured, He seems
proud
of the fact that professionals m the relevant disciplines even discussed the book, sliding
silendy over the actual content of the discussion (Bernal 1991; xviii-xix), He makes Molly
(ibrd.. xviii)! He makes much of the fact that
Myerowitz Levine sound like a
supporter
sharp criticism did not appear until 1989, nearly two years after the book’s appearance.
Such attack, he says, ‘which might well have been shattermg to the book’s academic
reputation m_ 1987 or 1988, has come far too late’ (xx), Here ‘forgets’ that, in the
Bernal

frustratingly slow rhythms of academic publishing, reviews scholarly journals usually

m_

appear only eighteen months or two years after their subyect’s publication.
12. Amid a vast literature see, for mstance, Berman (1994); Gates (1992, 1994);
Friedman (1995); Kaufman (1988); West (1993),
13. Guy MacLean Rogers ungencrously suggests that ‘it is hard m
retrospect not to see

the entire enterprise of Black Athena as a massive, fundamentally misguided projection

upon the second millennium BCE of Martin Bernal’s personal struggle to establish an

identity’ (1996a: 441).

14. The numerous
polemical exchanges on ancient Greece and its external relations
which have marked contemporary North American academia have, rather typically, failed
to note the implications for contending European nationalist clans. The relations
between ancient and modern Greek identity have been intensely controversial within the
Balkan political arena, though the controversy relates more to the issue of Macedonia
than to
Egyptian or Levanune links. Scholarly —
and very physical controversies —
at least
as bitter as the US ones over Afrocentrism have raged within the Balkans, centred on rival
clams to the anctent Macedonian herttage: see Danforth (1995); Poulton (1995);
Ugrinovska (1995). Among contributors to the Amertcan skirmishes, only Sarah P. Morris
(1996: 172) seems to have noticed the connection,
15. It is arguable, however, that ancient Egypt did have a
concept of socral justice,
invoked in one of the meanings of the multipurpose term ma ‘at see Assmann (1989).
 Part Three

Afrocentrism in the Present

 16

Wild Afrocentricity

Having traced a wide range of origins and influences on black —

especially
African-American —
cultural nationalist ideas about Africa, we now turn to

their high-profile contemporary manifestations.

Perhaps the most widely acknowledged living inspiration for current

Afrocentric ideas in the USA is Maulana Ron Karenga. He looms as a

massive presence of influence and stimulus behind Leonard Jeffries, Molefi

Asante and other current Afrocentric thinkers. He remains, however, a

somewhat mysterious personality. Karenga (Maulana means ‘master

teacher’ in Swahili, while Karenga supposedly means ‘the tradition’; so that
Ron has
immodestly entitled himself the Master Teacher of the Tradition)
has written less extensively than Asante. Despite occasional Visiting Profes-
sorships and the like, and his more recent elevation to chair of the Black
Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach, he has
always really belonged to the world of political activism rather than
academic Black Studies (although he apparently in 1995, at a
compara-
-

tively advanced age completed a PhD at UCLA, comparing Confucian

—

and
ancient Egyptian ethical philosophies). Over the years he has indeed proved
adept at playing the role of the hard-headed street activist among academics
(sce his impressively debunking performance in Karenga 1969), and, deftly
reversing himself, playing the savant to a less educated audience (Addai-
Sebo and Wong 1988). He is a more interesting, in some ways a shadier, but
also a more considerable character than most of the latter-day Afrocentric

ideologues. An undoubtedly substantial endowment of streetwise wit, and in

latter years an infusion of socialism into his eclectic brew of ideas, have
heiped to make his discourse usually more rational than those of the

younger Afrocentrists,
In Karenga's earlier (1960s) days, when he first founded and headed the
cultural nationalist organization US —

standing either for ‘United Slaves’

or
simply for ‘Us’ as
against ‘Them’: accounts vary
—

the rationality was far

less in evidence. US was based on a
paramilitary system of hierarchy,
with members supposed to wear khaki neo-African robes; on
unquestion-
ing obedience to Karenga's decrees; and on extreme sexism. The poct
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), a former follower of Karenga, recalled that

916
216 AFROGENTRISM

‘Karenga’s doctrine made male chauvinism a revolutionary legitimacy, .. .

When brothers (male members) went

by, the women were supposed to
“salimu” or “submit”, crossing their arms on their breasts and bowing
himself, Baraka
alleged, persistently verbally offensive
slightly.’ Karenga was

to women and sexually exploitative of US’s female members (Baraka 1984a:

275).
Amiri Baraka’s judgements on that score may have been coloured by
disillusioned hindsight, though the picture he paints is one that could be
for the intensely chauvinist atmosphere in many 1960s black
paralleled
—

and white —

radical groups, not least the Panthers (see E. Brown 1993;

Pearson 1994: passem). On Karenga’s doctrines,
the nature however,
of even

a
glance at the US booklet The Quotable Karenga (Halisi 1967; and, for a
clear summary, Van Deburg 1992: 171-6), or the Maulana’s later writings
and speeches, will confirm how accurate is Baraka's assessment: that they
were an extraordinary mélange of phrases and fragments of ideas lifted from
a
huge range of sources with the borrowings from white
—

writers, as Baraka
sneered, heavily disguised and given such —

coherence as they possess by the

force of Karenga’s personality and by being rooted in ‘an ahistorical

unchanging never-never-land Africa’ (Baraka 1984a: 253). Karenga’s rhet-

oric at that time also allegedly included direct incitements to kill whites (see
Genovese 1972: 217; and Karenga’s 1968 Manifesto ‘Black Art’, in Gates
and McKay 1997: 1976, which certainly appears to hint in that direction).
US’s activitics degenerated into a bloody faction fight with the Black
Panthers —

fight encouraged, and some

a allege in large part created, by
FBI covert operations (sce O'Reilly 1989). As a result, Baraka alleges,
Karenga’s behaviour became ever more
paranoid and eccentric: he kept a
machine gun mounted in his living-room, and developed heavy drug
dependence (Baraka 1984a: 280, 289). It is reported that Molefi Asante first
emerged to prominence as an attempted peacemaker in these California
batlles. The organization survived at least in name one of the few 1960s-
—

to do so, Karenga boasted in 1986 (Addai-

vintage black radical bodies as

Sebo and Wong 1988: 177); but its only significant success was the popular

reception in Afro-America of ‘Kwanzaa’, a

pseudo-African ‘traditional’
festival Karenga had invented as a substitute Christmas,’ Karenga himself
and Fanonist and socialist elements into his
incorporated more more

teachings, so that the eventual synthesis was very similar to the ideas of the
Black Panthers against whom he had once so bitterly fought, except that
Karenga’s version lacked the Panthers’ insurrectionary fervour. He sought
to buttress his Afrocentric neo-traditionalism with Diopian ideas on ancient
with Jacob
Egyptian wisdom, expressed in a series of works co-authored
Carruthers in which,
—
it must be assumed, the detail was overwhelmingly
the work of Carruthers, a
genuine, if highly idiosyncratic, Afrocentric
scholar.” Karenga even began to speak of the need to combat sexism (see
Addai-Sebo and Wong: 224-7).

Alongside Karenga, John Henrik Clarke is perhaps the other most widely
cited father-figure of Afrocentrism (if, in this familial trope so dear to
 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 217

Afrocentrists themselves, we visualize Diop as the solitary, revered grand-

father). Clarke is now the longest-serving, and apparently among the more

moderate, of the Afrocentric historical writers. Back in the 1960s, he was

the prime mover in the battles for control of the African Studies Association,
which we have sketched above (pp. 60-63). He has produced a
large
number of
popularizing works, marked more by an old-fashioned desire to

create pride in black achievements than by the aggressive separatism of

many other writers in the genre.
Clarke, who for many years taught history at Hunter College in New York,
was
evidently experienced as an
inspiring teacher by many younger Afrocen-
tric writers (sec, for instance, the warm tribute in Ani 1994: xxi-ii). He was

also a founder-member of the Harlem Writers’ Club, a friend of Malcolm X

in the latter's last years, and long-serving Associate Editor of Freedomways
magazine. There, his close association with both black and white leftists,
including Communists, seemed to some rather inconsistent with his gener-

ally separatist stance, and brought him bitter criticism from fiercely anti-
Communist cultural nationalists like Harold Cruse (Cruse 1967/1984:
337-44, 507-11). He has been a widely published short-story writer as well
as
popularizer. In recent
historical years almost no Afrocentric historical

publication, new or reprinted, has seemed complete without an Introduc-

tion or a Foreword by Clarke. He has also been a
prolific contributor to

such journals as Présence Africaine and The Black Scholar, producing wide-
ranging, highly coloured and sometimes frankly simplistic articles on a long
list of subjects from ancient Egypt to Caribbean slave revolts. He has

presented his own gloss on such familiar themes as the African origins of
humanity and the supposed southern roots of Egyptian culture (Clarke
1967), sketched the evolution of Pan-Africanism (Clarke 1988), offered an

overview of black American

writings on Africa which emphasizes the
inspirational, agitational polemics of his own intellectual tradition rather
than the more solid ~
if modest —
efforts of specialists (Clarke 1985), and
edited, among many other anthologics, an
important though almost—

entirely hagiographic -
collection on the life of Marcus Garvey (Clarke
1974).
Clarke fits well Jacob Carruthers’s definition of the ‘old scrappers’ of
Afro-American history, who:

without any special training, but a sincere dedication to ferreting out the
truth about the Black past and destroying the big lic of Black historical and
cultural inferiority, took whatever data were available and squeezed enough
truth from them as circumstances allowed. (quoted in Hill-Lubin 1992: 170)

Clarke places himself firmly in that tradition, Willis G.

citing Huggins,John
Yosef
Jackson,J.A. Rogers, Leo Hansberry and his friend Ben-Jochannen as

his inspirations (Clarke 1986: 46-7). Unfortunately, Carruthers’s reference

to as much truth ‘as circumstances allowed’ must be read to mean ‘as much
as an
overriding political purpose, and a very hazy idea of what constitutes
218 AFROCENTRISM

valid evidence for a claim, allowed’. Clarke evidently has a relaxed view of
evidence, seeing his function as mainly propagandist: making wild claims
that, for instance, ‘university life was fairly common’ in precolonial West
Africa (Clarke 1985: 162); that in most precolonial African societies there
was no social inequality at all (Person-Lynn 1996: 13); or that black
Americans ‘have always had a
positive image of Africa’ (ibid.: 157).
The broad-brush historical sketches he gave for London's 1986 Black
History Month (Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 37-61, 69-86, 105-31) were

shot through with inaccurate considerably less

claims, but these were

extreme than those made during the same event by Yosef Ben-Jochannen
or Frances Cress Welsing. Similarly, Clarke's prejudices appear less sweeping
than those of some other Afrocentrists; although his reported remarks on

those London occasions included several apparently anti-Semitic innuendos

(ibid.: 49-50, 117, 127). While he has replayed in interview old accusations
that ‘mulattos’ betray the black cause in places like Haiti and Jamaica

(Person-Lynn 1996: 10), and that Arabs are Africa’s historic enemies (ibid.:
11-12), these are muted by comparison with the bigotries of Ben-Jochannen
or Tony Martin, or those of Louis Farrakhan.
Clarke's attitude is well summed up in the words of Herbert Aptheker
which adopted as his own, in introducing a polemic over William Styron’s
he
novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. ‘History's potency is mighty. The

oppressed need it for identity and inspiration’ (quoted in Genovese 1972:

201). Politically as well as intellectually, this is very dubious. As Eugene
Genovese responded, the oppressed might be thought, rather, to need
history:

for the truth of has made

what the of them
worldand of what they have
helped make of the knowledge alone can produce that sense
world. This of

identity which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to

history to provide glorious moments or heroes invariably are betrayed into

making catastrophic errors in political judgement. (ibid.: 201)

A third important older practitioner of the Afrocentric approach to

history was Chancellor Williams, whose Destruction of Black Civilization (L971/

1987) is praised and drawn upon by writers as diverse as
John Henrik
Clarke, Molefi Asante, Amiri Baraka, and Howard University’s Vice-President,
Andrew J. Billingsley. Williams (1905-92), a student of Leo Hansberry and

long-serving history professor at Howard, emerges as an

oddly ambivalent
figure. On the one hand, his dedication to the task of recovering African
history cannot be doubted. It carried him from doctoral research on

African-American religion (never published, though he drew on it for one

of his three novels), through studies at Oxford, extensive African travels
and gathering of oral traditions, to sixteen ycars of research for Destructzon,
and kept him working even when he was nearly blind (Williams 1971/1987:
17-33).°> He insisted, in the finest tradition of autodidactic scholarship a —

tradition to which he evidently belongs despite his formal qualifications,

 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 219

with his idiosyncratic labours

solitary, undertaken with litde institutional.
for in-depth
on archival
the research.
need And there is no doubt
support
—

about the breadth of his reading. In a college lecture series, self-published

in 1964, he insisted (in sentiments quite at odds with the approach of his
own later book on Africa's past) that:

African history needs no

special pleading, no ‘inventions’, no romantic
idealization, no wishful thinking. What is required 1s the same as the

requirement of any and all history, the truth as fully as il can be reasonably
determined. (Williams 1964: 6)

Williams's first major book, The Rebirth of African Civilization (1961),

mainly a study of social mores and educational change in Ghana during its
transition to independence, was based on substantial fieldwork and was a

scrious, if neglected, contribution to the 1960s debate on Africa's future,

its idiosyncratic forays into comparative ethics and moral exhorta-
despite
tion. On the other hand, the more influential Destructon is, in many of its

aspects, as
piece of historical
thoroughly mythmaking as any of
fantastic a

Afrocentrism’s more obviously slapdash productions." Above all, Williams

presents a view of history more relentlessly racialized than almost anything
else in the genre. Racial identity is, for Williams, literally ‘the reason for

being’ (1971/1987: 250). He gives us a picture of Africa as the site of

unbroken racial war stretching across fifty centuries: indeed, more, for ‘It
seems quite clear that this sce-saw conflict ... covered centuries back into

prehistory’ (Ibid.: 64). It

might expect, primarily a war
was not, as we

between Africans and Europeans, though; Williams's great conflict is

between black Africans and Arabs. The ‘Asian imperialists’ have bcen trying
to take over the continent right from the start of the Egyptian Empire
—

Williams invents an
entirely fanciful story of bitter, centuries-long conflict
over Pharaonic Egypt, with black Nubians and Ethiopians resisting the white
Arab—Asian takeover and infiltration of their land, which had once formed
a
single black empire from the Mediterranean to Zimbabwe. He attributes
to the ‘Arabs’ who gradually took over Egypt an insensate hatred of blacks;
while the black Africans’ ‘badge of eternal honor was the blackness of their
skin. ...
They were “Children of the Sun” blessed with blackness by the Sun
God himself.... Their very blackness, therefore, was religious, a blessing
and an honor’ (122-3).
Arab tactics included infiltration, planned interbreeding in order to

create a ‘mulatto’ (Williams’s usual term) fifth column within Africa,

religious brainwashing, massive destruction of black artworks, monuments

and writings, and of course outright invasion and enslavement. The modern
conflict in the Sudan between Muslim, Arabizing north and ‘black’ south —

evidently had Williams's view of the world

which major impact on
is just
—

the continuation of the same long war. The wrecking of black civilization
was the work of the Arab imperialists far more -
and for far longer —
than
of European ones.’ It reduced what had once been a
single federal,
 220 AFROGENTRISM

democratic, highly literate African state imbued with near-supernatural

wisdom goodness governed by a single ‘African Constitution’
and —

(161-75)
-
toa condition of fragmented, hopeless savagery.®Williams's picture of the
flight of the Nile valley Africans, {fleeing Arab devastation, is a masterpiece
of pathos:

Once the paths they made in Hight could be followed for days by their bloody
footprints in the sand. ... Later wavellers and slave-hunters could determine
the various routes of flight by the skeletons found here and there, fallen
statues left by those who could not make it on. They were generally disjointed
and scattered; sometimes it was a
bony arm protruding from the windswept
sands, a
leg over there or a skull seeming to smile ‘peace at last!’. The bones
of other thousands who died in flight were never seen.
They lay buried
forever under the tons of sand and rocks. (191)

The only problem with this mournful tale is that, like almost everything that
had gone before in Williams’s story, it is sheer fantasy. Travellers’ tales from
the 1820s and carlicr do indeed report sightings of numerous human
skeletons along Saharan trade routes, and perhaps it is these that inspired
Williams's flight of macabre fancy. The skeletons, however, were undoubt-
edly recent: relics of the trans-Saharan slave trade.

Just as remarkable is the book’s utterly damning view of modern Africa.

Basically, Williams accepts all the most absurd and derogatory Kuropean
myths about colonial-era Africa ubiquitous savagery, incompetence, —
Hlit-

eracy, superstition, cannibalism, and the rest and modifies the picture —

only by claiming that this awful situation was the result of the depredations
of outsiders: of the Europeans but, far more, of the Arabs, Their unending
war
against the blacks reduced the latter to ‘the lowest levels of dog-cat-dog
existence’ (49), and to ‘hell on earth’ (299). For Williams, as for many
other Afrocentrists, glorifying Africa’s past appeared to require disparaging
its present inhabitants.
Together with Karenga, Clarke, Williams and George James, the most
frequently cited Afrocentric figure from the older generation is probably
John G. Jackson (1907-93), who published several pamphlets on religious
and historical themes in the 1930s, and collaborated with Harlem schoo!-
master Willis Huggins N. African
on An Introduction to Civilizations, with Main
Currents Ethtopian History (Huggins and Jackson 1937). Jackson had
in

apparently been Huggins’s school pupil (and was later, in old age. to lecture
on various college Black Studies courses), but the book itself described him

only as a ‘member of the Rationalist Press Association, London, England’,

Although it partook of many of the usual romantic and ill-evidenced claims
about the racial character of the Egyptians, their debts to Ethiopia and
Greece's to them, Huggins’s and Jackson’s work was on other levels an

impressive production for its day, lis lengthy bibliographies, survey of the
state of educational provision on African themes in the 1930s USA, and
suggestions for the teaching not only of African history but that of the entire
 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 221

diaspora including South America Europe, constituted

and a genuinely
groundbreaking exercise (Huggins and
Jackson 1937: 140-203). It may well
be that no one else at that time, anywhere in the world, had compiled so
wide-ranging a checklist of resources on African history.
The book's political purposes were evident: both the by then time-
honoured general one of vindicating past African greatness, and a more

specific aim of arousing admiration for Ethiopia’s past. A large part of the
text was devoted specifically to Ethiopia, then struggling unsuccessfully to
maintain its independence against Mussolini’s aggression. The struggle
aroused widespread interest and sympathy among black Americans, to

which the book was

evidently intended to contribute Huggins himself was
—

apparently active in the ‘International Council of Friends of Ethiopia’ (see

J. Harris 1994).
Jackson’s own much later magnum opus, carrying the same main title as
his and Huggins’s predecessor, Introduction to African Civilizations, and to a
limited degree based on it, appeared in 1970, Jackson's work, like that of
Chancellor Williams or
J.A. Rogers, is an uneasy mixture of assiduous

independent scholarship and wild fantasy; though with far less of the latter
than there is in Williams's writing or that of several younger Afrocentrists.

Jackson certainly exhibited some of the now familiar faults of this kind of
history-writing: an indiscriminate use of sources, including reliance on

mystical and global-diffusionist speculation by the likes of Albert Church-

ward and Gerald Massey; romantic inflation of the glories of past African
kingdoms; a dogmatic and undocumented belief that Egyptian civilization
must have come down the Nile from Nubia and Ethiopia; and a general
tendency to fill the gaps in his knowledge with brightly coloured reveries.
He also occasionally spills over into genuinely bizarre statements, like saying
that the Lighthouse of Pharos ‘was erected at a cost of about $680,000; and
in those days dollars were worth much more than they are at the present
time’ (1970/1994: 118). But other parts of Jackson’s work, especially those
which deal with the more recent past, are merely romanticized rather than

wholly fantastic. His yet more ambitious Man, God and Civilization (1972)
similarly mixed lucid and vigorous attacks on targets ranging from organized
religion to Eurocentric historiography, with a reliance on sources that were
at best dated, at worst (as with Churchward, Godfrey Higgins and Jackson's
great hero Gerald Massey) downright eccentric. Still, despite Jackson’s
wilder flight of fancy, in him one again sees an
example of an earlier,
obscure, self-taught Afrocentrist producing work superior to that of most of
the younger, far more highly educated and publicized exponents.
Considerably more bizarre than Clarke, Jackson or Williams are figures
such as Leonard Jeffries, Frances Cress Welsing and Yosef Ben-Jochannen.
The best-known advocate of modern Afrocentric approaches is probably
Jeffries, of New York’s City College. Yet since he has published very little
—

as
opposed giving
to many media interviews —
it is hard to summarize his
views responsibly, or to ascertain how far they may have been misrepre-
sented by sensationalist coverage.” Certainly his reported belief that whites
222 AFROCENTRISM

are biologically inferior because of their relative lack of melanin and their

genes malformedby the Ice Age, as against the innate superiorityof black
‘Sun People’, is not intellectually serious or responsible. Nor is his supposed
insistence on the particular guilt of the Jews for the slave trade (sce D’Souza
1991: 7; Leslie 1992; Person-Lynn 1996: 215-45).
intellectual authoritarian and
Leonard Jeffries is clearly both an a

demagogue. Inspeecha in 1991, he allegedly claimed that the Jews bore

the main responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, while latterly they,
through their of the film industry and in unholy alliance
control with the
Italians (1), masterminding
were the oppression and even destruction of
Afro-Americans. City College, in reaction, sacked him as chairman of the
Black Studies Department. He took them to court, was reinstated and won
$400,000 in damages, but this judgement was reversed on
appeal by New
York’s Supreme Court.*
Frances Cress Welsing is probably best known as the most prominent
advocate of the view that AIDS is the product of a genocidal white conspiracy
to exterminate people of colour. This planned genocide in its turn is
motivated by whites’ consciousness of their genctic inferi-
supposedly own

ority, which leads them to fear ‘genetic annihilation’ by non-whites (Wels-

and Wong 1988: 293). ‘I say that skin whiteness is a
ing, in Addai-Sebo
genetic people can produce white pcople. White people
mutation, Black
can only produce people. Whites are white
mutants of black people’
(Person-Lynn 1996: 72). White persecution and massacre of blacks is thus
an
inescapable, biologically determined survival strategy. Hitler's attempted
destruction of the Jews was an earlier phase in this same Jews ~

process
being:

the products of the genetic mixture produced when white Greek and Roman
soldiers invaded Africa and raped African women, who of course were black,
Semite is the same as the word mulatto. Thus they were considered to be half
black and half white or
genetically coloured people. Thus, a yellow coloured
star was
placed on their outer clothing by the German government in the
Hider era. (Addai-Sebo and Wong: 294)"

It is difficult to convey a full impression of Cress Welsing’s texts without

being able to reproduce her diagrams, which ‘show’, for instance, how the
Christian cross is a symbol of the black male genitalia, as are the Nazi
swastika —
and the Christmas Washington and Jefferson
tree, the gun, the
Memorials in DC, the 1941 New logo, footballs, baseballs,
York World’s Fair

cigars, chocolate bars, the bull in Spanish bullfighting (Cress Welsing ...

1991: xiv—xv, 47, 62-3, 67, 75-6, 108-9, 112-13, 131-43). Her thoughts on
Christmas may, however, gave a faint flavour of the whole book’s character:

The Christmas tree is, in its abstracted form, a cross —

the symbol of the Black

male genitals. (See Diagram V.) First, the Christmas tree is chopped down in
the forest. Then it is taken home. In the US, when the Christmas tree is
 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 223

decorated, colored ‘balls’ are

hung on the tree. When the tree is taken down
and burned, the ‘balls’ are first taken off Then we can all dream of a ‘white
Christmas’ and a surviving white Christ. (ibid.: 75; original emphasis)

According to Cress Welsing, whites do not fear, hate and feel obsessed by
black male members because they are
supposedly bigger than white ones

{though Cress Welsing believes that too fibid.: 96-7), Rather, their
obsession is:

because of Blacks’ to produce the highest levels of melanin

ability and

thereby the greatest potential for white genetic annihilation. This basic logic
of disgust with the white genetic and genital self drives the brain-computer
in the white-male collective to selfnegating patterns of behaviour .. .

[W]hite male homosexuality may be viewed as the symbolic attempt to

incorporate into the white male body more male substance by cither sucking
the penis of another male and orally ingesting the semen, or
by having male
ejaculate deposited in the other end of the alimentary canal. Through anal
intercourse, the selfdebasing white male may fantasize that he can produce
a
product of color, albeit that the product of color 1s fecal matter. This

fantasy is significant for white males because the males who can
produce skin
color are viewed as the real men. (47; original emphasis)

That dreadful passage, with bigotry, is not an isolated

itsmultiple levels of
aberration. There are many Welsing’s work,'® even if
paralleling it in Cress
there are more like ideas
which read salvaged from Lenny Henry's or
Richard Pryor’s wastebins. (Whites think that a
dog is their best friend,
whereas other peoples know that God is theirs [27]; white males at weddings
wear ‘black tails’, symbolizing yet again their penis envy [148]).... Enough.
But Cress Welsing’s idiotic and contemptible book had reportedly sold
40,000 copies within a few months of publication, almost entirely through
black-owned outlets (Dyson 1993: 159).
Much the same mixture of incredulity and
is induced by some of distaste
the ideas of an otherwise figure, Yosef Ben-Jochannen
far more
reputable
(born 1917), who appears to
espouse what one might charitably call a more
activist conception of the idea of race war than that found in Cress Welsing’s
work. Addressing a London conference m 1986, Ben-Jochannen several
times hinted heavily at his desire for the audience to kill whites, though ‘Pm
not here to tell whenyou or where, or how, in public’ (Addai-Sebo and

Wong 1988: 119).

Praising Henry Christophe’s massacre of whites in

revolutionary Haiti (though Ben-jochannen has it wrong: Christophe com-

mitted no such massacre, and he probably means Dessalines, who did), he
burst out: ‘Christophe did the right thing. He should have killed off the
whole of Santo Domingo’ (ibid.: 58). Pontificating about the undesirability
of interracial marriage, he asked: ‘Can I lay [sze] in bed tonight with a white
woman, then plan her father’s murder and tell her: “I’m going to kill you
[sec] father tomorrow”?’ (ibid.: 48). He went on: ‘we are at war, thus Tam in
224 AFROGENTRISM

this and is level’ (ibid.:

a death struggle ... is a war; a war fought on every
50~51). Elsewhere, interview, in he urged that the answer to alleged unjust
police killings of African-Americans was to ‘just kill the policeman, or his
family, or somebody in his family in revenge’ (Person-Lynn 1996: 61).
BenJochannen has taught, on a
part-time or visiting basis, in a wide
variety of academic institutions over the years (he more than once boasted,
doubtless exaggerating, of having been fired from forty-seven different
schools! [Addar-Sebo and Wong 1988: 124; Person-Lynn 1966: 52]), but he
is proud of a
primary affiliation to the self-taught intellectualism of the
street corner and the Garveyite nationalist tradition. Overwhelmingly the
most important political fluence on his career, he has acknowledged at

length, is the Garveyite legacy (1982: 15-23; Person-Lynn 1966: 61). He was

apparently for a long time an activist in and, after 1963, President —

of —

small Harlem-based_ nationalist organization called ‘African Nationals in

America’ (1971: 589). At the beginning of one book, he pays “tribute to the
unclaimed heroes who stood on the Harlem street corners day on their ladder
and night... preaching the Black man’s heritage to countless African-
Americans who once
passed them by as if they had leprosy’ (1971: 2)."
Offering a
long list of these activists, he places himself firmly among their
number. Elsewhere he reflected on his work:

I write it for the litde man m the street, so to speak . ., ITwrite for the masses

of the people —
which would be around the 7th or 8th grade levels. Whenever
I don’t use words within that scope, it is because I find no
way in which I can

explain myself at that level... I don’t care if they never called me a scholar.

(1982: 13)

Rejecting any notion of academic objectivity as a deceit, he avows that his

central aim is to arouse the emotions of his readers: ‘] want you to get mad,
T want you to get sad and I want you to get happy when I write’ (ibid.:
14-15).
Alongside this populism, however, lies an intense scholasticism typical of
the autodidact black vindicationism we have been tracing. Ben-Jochannen’s
works may be intended for ‘the lite man in the street’, but they are also

heavy with
bibliographies obscure
and texts, allusions
references to to often
hidden knowledge, long quotations from a wide
range of sources. His list of

publications, extending over nearly fifty years, is very long: though there is
a
huge amount of repetition both within and between his main works.
There is an obsessional quality about his writing largely self-published, at —

least until the Baltimore-based Black Classic Press began reissuing some of
it in the late 1980s. He sees himself engaged in a lonely battle for the truth,
against powerful and even sinister forces:

T have purposefully traversed the once most holy grounds of the tabooed,
and removed the cover of secrecy surrounding the myth of a ‘Semutic, Hanutece
or ‘Caucasian’ east or north Africa; thereby, showing that behind these terms
 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 225

are the seeds of racism and religous bigotry, all of which had their origin as far
back as the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew (Jewish) Torah or Christian Old
Testament of the Holy Bible (any version). For this am
willing to pay the
I

price that befalls anyone who dares to tread Holy of Holies of Judaeo-
into the
Christian Greek-Centric Anglo-Saxon Indo-European Aryan mythological

Despite the evident, intense —

albeit indiscriminate —

study Ben-Jochannen
devoted over
many years to Egyptology and related fields, his command of
African history is as bizarre as
every other aspect of his thought. He places
the founding of the Monomotapa kingdom in Zimbabwe at 100 cr, and the

beginning of the Zulu kingdom at 300: dates respectively at least 1,000 and
1,450 years too early (1972: 17). Elsewhere, yet more haywire, he dates
Monomotapa to ‘about 1200 to 1700 scr’ (ibid.: 79). He has urged that
the Yoruba and the Hutu peoples (the latter of whom he quite wrongly
identifies ‘pygmies’} derive from ancient
with Egypt (Person-Lynn 1966:
54-6). He is capable
even of telling a black London audience that to

discover their Egyptian heritage they should visit: “Not only the Museum of
Natural History, but you need to look at the Egyptian Museum, located a few
blocks from one another’ (Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 114). This is rather
like a man selling coals to Newcastle who doesn’t have any coal to sell, tries
to tell the buyers his coal is green, and thinks Newcastle is just next door to

Brighton.”
Ben-Jochannen has thus been a prolific if extremely repetitive author,
— ~

pursuing ideas about the Egyptian, and therefore black origins of civiliza-
tion, and of a concerted white conspiracy to conceal these, which represent
the most elaborated version of the long Afro-American autodidact tradition
of Egyptophilia. Ben-Jochannen pays tribute to some significant precursors
in that tradition, especially G.G.M. James and John G. Jackson. Otherwise,
there are
repeated references to the genre's most popular sources on

ancient history: Herodotus and Volney, of course, plus a wide range of

Egyptologists (mostly very old and largely superseded works like those of
J.H. Breasted, E.A. Budge, Gaston Maspero, and Flinders Petrie) and
eccentrics like Albert Churchward and Gerald Massey. Ben-Jochannen's
preoccupations also offer many parallels to the theories of Cheikh Anta

Diop, though clearly Ben-JJochannen developed his ideas without knowledge

of Diop’s his best-known
—

works, Africa: Mother of‘ Western Civilization’ (1971)

which draw remarkable
and Black Man
of the Nile and His Family (1972), on a

and promiscuous range of sources including many mystical and Masonic

texts, make no mention of Diop.
Black Man of the Nile is rambling, seemingly structureless
an extraordinarily
book, full of asides
everything on blackness of Jesus and the falsity
from the
of white Jews’ identification with the Hebrews of the Bible to the Egyptian

origins of Freemasonry. The earlier book, equally strangely organized, is

clearly intended to serve in part as a student text, with essay assignments,

passages in question-and-answer form, and interspersed ‘Lecture-Essays’.

 AFROCENTRISM
226

Major themes of both (and of Ben-Jochannen’s other books, which largely

repeat the same material) include all the
expected zdées fixes: the blackness
of Egypt; the Ethiopian origins of Egyptian culture and the Egyptian roots
of Greece, of monotheistic religion, of all art and science; the cultural unity
of Africa; the wrongness
—

indeed, wickedness -
of the label ‘Negro’ (a
particular fetish of
Ben-Jochannen’s, this) et cetera. Summary is near-
impossible, and any in case Ben-Jochannen advances no
arguments not to

be found, more coherently expressed, in the work of Diop and others.

Ben-Jochannen claims to be of Ethiopian Jewish origin. This is apparently
false, an impersonation in the grand old tradition of all the pretending
Ashanti princes, Yoruba priests, and so on, who have for decades intermit-

tently grabbed the attention and sought to lighten the purses of particularly

gullible Afro-Americans. In the case of ‘Dr. Ben’, seemingly in reality of

Puerto Rican origin," the identification serves
mainly as a stick with which
to beat American Jews, and a cover for his oddball but vehement brand of
anti-Semitism. He returns time and again to the argument one with a —

much older Afro-American history, as we have seen that the ‘white Jews’ —

of the Western world are

imposters on a historic scale, falsely claiming a
heritage which rightfully belongs to black Africans, and propounding a
racist creed dating to the very origins of Judaism (among many such
discussions, sce Ben-Jochannen 1983: passim; 1971: 584-627; 1972: 67-70;
Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 52, 66). He can assert ridiculously —
that —

Mussolini exterminated 4.5 million Falashas in his 1930s invasion of Ethiopia

(Addai-Sebo and Wong 118). He can ‘explain’ the Balfour Declaration (the
British Government’s First World War promise of support for a Jewish
national homeland) like this: ‘they arranged to double-cross the Arabs with
a secret
agreement signed by Heime Wiseman, an English Jew living in
...

England, Jonah B. Wise, and Stephen Wise and others’ (ibid.: 52). It is
almost superfluous to point out that the only genuine historical personage
among Dr Ben's three wise men is American rabbi Stephen Wise, who had
nothing whatever to do with the Balfour Declaration. Ben-Jochannen’'s
speeches and writings are
spattered, moreover, with dismissive references to

the ‘so-called Holocaust’, with allegations about the Jews being primarily

responsible for the Aulantic slave trade, and so on (e.g. AddaiSebo and

Wong 34, 46-8, 11'7~18)."

This poisonous nonsense would not be worth tarrying over, if echoes of
the same views —

as well as the same ludicrous vision of history —

were nol to

be heard in more reputable Afrocentric academic circles. It also connects

with a wider argument, identifying the original biblical Hebrews as a black

nation. This idea has been popular among the various communities of US
black Jews (whose beliefs and rituals have tended to be just as widely
removed from those of Judaism itself as the Nation of Islam's are from the
mainstream of world Islam), and such eccentric groups as the Washington,
DG ‘Church of God and Saints in Christ’, ‘Prophet’ Cherry's movement in

Philadelphia, the ‘Original Hebrew Israelite Nation’, and the Command-

ment Keepers of Harlem, all of which identified themselves as lost tribes of
 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 227

Israel (Brotz 1970; Moses 1993: ch, 11). Latter-day equivalents have included
the Ansaru Allah Community of Brooklyn, formerly the Nubian Islamic
Hebrew Mission —

as Wilson J. Moses says, a ‘singularly eclectic sect’ who

mix Judaic, Christian and Islamic beliefs (1993: 191; see also Gardell 1996:
225-31) —

and the Reverend Albert Cleage’s Detroit Shrine of the Black

Madonna (Moses 1993: 220-21).
A more coherent, better documented, though little more
persuasive
version of these arguments than Ben-Jochannen’s hasrecently been pre-
sented by another US Afrocentric writer, Jose Malcioln (1996); while
California clergyman William LaRue Dillard has argued at length that a vast

range of the peoples and characters referred to in the Christian Bible are

identifiably black or African (1990). A related idea -

which Ben-Jochannen
among others, propagates
—

is that Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam,

derived entirely from Egyptian sources. This is argued not only on the basis
of the tenuous similarities between some biblical texts and certain Egyptian
ones, and the
speculation —

made by Sigmund Freud famous that Moses —

Egyptian priest, but of allegedly similar

was an on account
religiouspractices
which
such as circumcision and a taboo on
eating pork (the last is an error
goes as far back as Herodotus: in fact there is abundant evidence of pig-

keeping in ancient Egypt). Associated beliefs include the insistence, which

has been recurrent for well over 150 years, that Jesus was black (see Albert
Cleage’s Black Messiah, 1968'") -
Marcus Garvey, among many others,
identified himself with this claim -
and that the Christian image of the
Madonna is a mere
copy of
Egyptian depictions of Isis as mother-goddess.'®
The Ansars apparently have their own version of the widespread idea that
biacks are the original human beings, and whites an accursed, degenerate
offshoot. The original whites were lepers, shunned by their black relatives,
who retreated in ancient times from Africa to the Caucasus. ‘they There

(mainly the women) had sexual intercourse with the jackal (the original
dog) and, through this intercourse, the offspring that was
brought forth was
an
ape-like man’ (Ansar pamphlet quoted in Moses 1993: 192), This has
echoes of the earlier theories of mutant or
degenerate white origins
proposed by the Nation of Islam; while rap group Public Enemy have
regularly popularized their own version of it (sce Tate 1992: 125); and such
Afrocentric pseudo-scholars as Frances Cress Welsing also endorse the idea

(Person-Lynn 1996: 85-7). The legend also has some surprising parallels yet
further aficld: apparently some Chinese believed that the Japanese were

descended from the union of monkeys and degenerate Chinese criminals

(Dower 1986: 85).

There is less distance than one might think between bizarre beliefs of this
kind and much present-day academic Afrocentrism. Indeed, although most

of the leading theorists of Afrocentrism hold academic posts, the real aim
some seem to pursue is to present not a new scholarly approach, nor even —

as critics like Schlesinger and Hughes suggest —

a form of compensatory
therapy for the disadvantaged, but something more akin to a new
religion.
228 AFROCENTRISM

This will become more

apparent as we look in some detail at the writings of
the most
prominent such theorist, Molefi Kete Asante.

Notes

1. On the widespread adoption, commercialization and ‘mainstreaming’ of Kwanzaa,

see
Karenga (1988); McClester (1993); plus Wilde (1995).
2. See especially Carruthers (1995), probably the most
examination of ancient
detailed
Egypuan thought yet produced by a US Afrocentrist; though it is by no means clear how
far Carruthers’s writings on ancient Egypt are based on primary research or knowledge of
relevant ancient languages. He writes overwhelmingly in the shadow of Cheikh Anta Diop,
whose ideas pervade lus work, together with subsidiary influences from less careful
authorities like James's Stolen Legacy and Ben-Jochannen’s works, Carruthers’s major
purpose is to establish the relevance of ancient Egyptian philosophy for medern Afro-
Americans. Like Diop, he wants to sce Ancient Egyptian replace Greek and Latin as the
‘classical’ languages of the education system (Carruthers 1984: 40). He remains wedded
to the Diopian view of ‘Western’ knowledge as inherently alicnating and inhumane, as

against. the spintual and holistic inclinations of “Afmcan Deep Thought’ (Carruthers
1995): and he feels that the ‘Wisdom of Governance in Kemet’ provides a modcl for
modern statecraft (Carruthers 1986).
3, Brief biographical details and a
hagiographic intellectual sketch of Williams's work
are
given in Rashidi (1994),
Clarke
Henrik that the book’s may be attributabie to the
‘4.John suggests unevenness

aged poor health

author's while he was completing it (Person-Lynn 1996: 11).
5. It may be noted that these wild claims, unlike so much else in the literature, are not

to have known.
prefigured by Diop whose work Williams does not seem
—
On the contrary,

Diop had insisted that ideas of Arab invasion into Sub-Saharan Africa were
‘figments of
the magmation’ (1987; 102).
6. These emphases are already evident in the earlier, generally far more level-headed,
Problems in
African History (Williarms 1964), albeit more moderately expressed. The ant-
islamic prepudices are already aired there, including a peculiar claim that Muslim regions
of Africa had less educational provision than any other part (1964: 6), the romantic view
of ancient African ‘democracy’ (54-6) and the overarching schema of belief in cata-

strophic contmental decline afier the fall of medieval African empires.

7. Jeffries has clamed to be at work on a
major history of the slave trade, and a ten-

volume (1) study of the Jewish role in the enslavement of Africans: Person-Lynn (1966:
229, 243).
of these extended with Kwaku
8. Jeffries’s own version events is given man mterview

Person-Lynn (1996; 229-45),

9. The notion of Jews as products of black-white admixture is far from new, and can
be found, for instance, in Diop’s writings: see Diop (1991: 65),
10. Indeed, Cress Welsing has repeated these claims almost verbatim in interview,

adding the predictable assertion that homosexuality is a natural outgrowth of the white
psyche but alien to that of Afmcans: Person-Lynn (1996: 83-5).
L1. Emphases here and m1 subsequent Ben-Jochannen quotations are
original: frequent
use of underlinings and block capitals is an integral feature of his distinctive style.
12.To explam, for any reader who docs not know London: the Natural History
Museum is devoted to dinosaur bones and stuffed animals, contaming no
Egyptian relics
at all; there is no such place as the ‘Egyptian Museum’; and the Briush Museum, which
does contun the mayor Egyptian collections, is several miles from the Natural History
Museum.
13. He has spoken in intermew of growmg up there and of having been active in the
New York-based movement for Puerto Rican independence (BenJochannen 1982: 16-17;
AddarSebo and Wong 1988; 119); while his first recorded publication was a
pamphlet m

Spanish. If he were indeed bern in Gondar, Ethiopia, as he has claimed, tt 1s hard to sce
 WILD AFROCENTRICITY 229

where he might have acquired the middie names Alfredo Antomo, As St Clair Drake
rather charitably puts it: ‘Ben-Jochannen’'s books challenge the reader to exercise alert
vigilance to disunguish betwecn fact, statements with a high degree of probability, and
assertions based merely on a will to believe’ (1987: 326).
14. Ben-Jochannen has on occasion, however, written in more conventional vein. A

junior high-school textbook on Africa he co-wrote m 1971 (BenJochannen, Brooks and

Webb) is a basic, competent, unexcepuonable survey of the continent, with almost no

trace of Dr Ben’s usual biases or obsessions.

15, Although such historical claims are made only sketchily in Cleage’s book, whose
main
purpose ts to put forward a kind of Afro-American liberation theology based more

on the psychological and political utility of conceiving of Jesus as black than on the
historical truth of such assertions. Jesus was, for Cleage, ‘the non-white leader of a non-

white people struggling for national liberation against the rule of a white nation, Rome’
(1968: 3). He was
‘trying to rebuild the Black Nation Israel’ (ibid.: 72), the origmal Jews
being ‘a Black Nation intermingled with all the black peoples of Africa’ (243), who also
included the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the Chaldacans, from whom Abraham came

(39-40). Like Ben-Jochannen and others, Cleage argues that white Jews are descendants
of much later converts. In any case, it is now African-Americans who are the Chosen

People of God (53-4, 59).

Ben-Jochannen’s African Origen of the Major Western Religions (1974) makes these
16.
arguments at great and disorganized length. His Afrikan Ongins of the Major World Religions
(with Oduyoye and Finch, 1988) is a more concise version. In this volume Modupe
Oduyoye puts forward a more cautious and rational argument, suggesting parallels
between Judaco-Christian and African religious names, but not asserting that the former
necessarily copted the latter. Oduyoye's and Ben-Jochannen’s editor, the British Afrocenu-
ist Amon Saba Saakana, makes his displeasure at Oduyoye’s relauve good sense plain
(ibid.: Preface: pages unnumbered).
 17

Molefi Asante:
Godfather of Afrocentrism

Molefi Kete Asante was born in Georgia in 1942, and originally

small-town
christened Arthur Lee Smith. He his family had strong traceable
claims that
Asante and Mandinka ancestry, though he also notcs a
Muskogee Indian
1993a: 127). He his he
great-grandmother (Asante adopted present name,

informs us, after a visit to Ghana in 1972, when the University of Ghana
librarian expressed surprise that someone called Arthur Smith was not an

Englishman: ‘He could not understand how a

person with an African
it seemed 1 vowed
phenotype could have an English name or so to me ...

then and there that I would change my name’ (ibid.: 141). The story sounds
odd: a university librarian, in a country whose notable historical and political

figures include people with surnames like Brown, Jones, Moore, Williams,
Taylor, Timothy, Welbeck, Woode, Dadson, Mercer, Hutton-Mills and a

whole dynasty of Casely Hayfords all of them with unquestionably ‘African

~

unable understand that a ‘Smith’ could be black? I take

phenotypes’ —
to

leave not to believe in his disbelief, or in Asante’s story.!

Be that as it may, it is clear that Asante's upbringing in intensely
segregated, racial-violence-haunted Georgia and Tennessee, well before the
Civil Rights movement made any serious inroads there, must have shaped
his subsequent thought. He insists time and again in a recent autobiograph-
ical essay on the absolute divisions of that carly environment: ‘T knew from
a very early age that the world of America was black and white ... two

colors, origins,
two two destinies’ (ibid.: 129). The utter Manichaeism of his
later thought comes straight from this mould. He even appears to be
been another if had school
grateful for it: ‘It might have matter
T gone to

and to church with whites when I was younger. I might have suffered
confusion, double-consciousness, but T did not (ibid.: 137). The only
is how far Asante, with his constant invocations of
surprise, perhaps,
‘centeredness’, his avowal that ‘One becomes Afrocentric by exploring
connections, visiting the quiet places, and remaining connected’ (ibid:
142), has incorporated New Age catchphrases into his language despite
being brought up poor in Georgia rather than affluent in California. No
doubt his period as a
graduate student and lecturer in southern California
accounts for this.

gon
 MOLEFI ASANTE: GODFATHER OF AFROCENTRISM 23)

Asante is the most influential, widely quoted Afrocentric writer today. He

heads the African-American Studics Department at Temple University,
has hyperactive consultant
been the establishment of
Philadelphia, a on

Afrocentric school throughout the USA, and is the long-serving

curricula
editor of the Afrocentric movement’s house magazine, the Journal of Black
Studies. (In the later 1990s he has been joined by a co-editor, Terry Kershaw,
also of Temple University.) Unlike Jeffries and most other academics

working this vein, he has published prolifically. Scrutiny of his long list of
reveals, however, that they include a considerable amount
pubiications soon
of repetitive matter. We can therefore reasonably confine ourselves, primar-
ily, to his two most major recent texts: Afrocentncity, his widely cited,
impassioned statement of position which has gone through three editions
(Asante 1988); and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge which, by contrast, is
the most extended attempt to give the movement academic credentials
(Asante 1990). We shall also look at the Journal of Black Studies which Asante
edits, at various Temple University colleagues and disciples of Asante, and
at the most extended, heavily documented attempt to formulate an Afrocen-
tric philosophical critique of Eurocentrism, Marimba Ani’s Yurugu (1994).
The far more intellectually substantial output of Cheikh Anta Diop which —

almost all of what little underpinning the movement has in

provides
historical scholarship has already been —
discussed (see Chapter 14 above).
Diop erudite, if clearly sometimes wrong-headed, thinker does not —

an
—

belong in this company, despite Asante's chutzpah in alluding matily to

‘Cheikh, as some of us often called him’, seeking to pretend an intimate
friendship with the Senegalese (1988: ix). We shall also investigate more
briefly some other currently active Afrocentric writers, though on the whole
they appear to advance few —

if any —

substantial themes or theses not found

in Diop’s, Bernal’s, Asante’s, Ben-Jochannen’s Karenga’s writings. or

The organizing principle of Molefi Asante’s work is, of course, an

organicist conception of nationhood, never clearly defined but intended to

assert the natural, psychic and spiritual unity of all people of African descent
around a set of principies supposedly derived from ancient Egypt. From this
core arises a set of propositions which (imposing order on Asante’s often
chaotic writings rather than discerning order in them) may be summarized
as follows:

1. Humanity first developed in Africa, so that Africans have some kind of

cosmological as well as chronological priority over other human groups.

2. The first civilization was that of ancient Egypt, or Kemet. This was

specifically a black African civilization, whose founders came from the

south, but whose intellectual, technological and other developments
were autarkic.
3, These Egyptian civilizational developments formed the basis for all
African culture and thought across the continent. This therefore forms a

unity in all spheres, from shared spiritual values to common technologies.

 AFROCENTRISM
232
4, Egyptian ideas and inventions also formed the basis for ancient Greek
civilization, and thus of all European development.
5, Process (3) was a result of diffusion, but process (4) was one of theft.

Subsequently Europeans have conspired to obscure (1) and (4), while

brainwashing Africans into forgetfulness of (2) and (3).
6. The cultural and spiritual unity of Africans, derived from ancient

Egyptian sources, extends also and in undiluted —

form to diasporic —

these deliberately
peoples of African descent. They must return to

obscured sources, value only that which tends to strengthen them, and
eschew all ideas or practices which do not derive from them.
7. All of this makes African-Amcricans a nation or, more
properly, part of —

the unitary African nation with its own civilization,

—

values, belicf system,

social and even language (‘Ebonics’, defined as the ‘language
practices
in the United States by African-Americans which uses
spoken many
but is based African syntactic clements and
English words on sense

modalities’ [Asante 1988: 121]*). These are

superior to those of other
groups, and especially to those of European-descended peoples.

Very few, if any, of these claims are

original to Asante: as we have seen,

almost all of them can be found (more coherently argued for) in Diop’s
work, and many repeat motifs from successive generations of Afro-American
since least the 1840s. The why little of it can be taken
publicists at reasons

seriously as history are very numerous. That (secondary) aspect of the case

which relates for Greek thought is discussed

to supposed Egyptian origins
elsewhere, in the more challenging context of Diop’s and Bernal’s ideas. As
for the notion —

more important for Asante’s argument

—

that all African

cultures are based predominantly Egyptian sources,
on this resis on three
fallacies, which we have also previously noted but may be rapidly summar-

ized. The first is ‘unanimism': the belief that Africa is or was culturally
homogencous in the sense that all Africans share a common world-view,
The second fallacy is diffusionism: if human
the phenomena of
belief that

any kind are found to be similar places, in they different

must necessarily
have spread from one to the others. The third is primordialism: a claim that

presently observable belicfs, practices or identities derive by long, unbroken

continuity from an ancient past. All these are thought by most serious
students of African history to be generally untrue: the ‘invention of
tradition’ has been as
ubiquitous in Africa as anywhere elsc, The mass of
historical literature tracing the modern making and remaking of ‘tribal’
identities is an obvious case in point (sce, for example, Lonsdale 1977;
Spear and Waller 1993; Vail 1989).
If the unanimist, diffusionist and notions of African identity
primordialist this is still of African-
mythicize the history of the continent itself, more true

descended groups in the Americas. There is a rich and complex literature

on the question of African cultural ‘survivals’ in various New World socicties,
from claims (also pretty thoroughly discredited) of total
ranging now

deculturation under slavery to assertions of very important continuities.

 MOLEFI ASANTE: GODFATHER OF AFROCENTRISM 233

Some of these debates are

surveyed above. We can say, however, that no

intellectually serious position can support the claims made by Asante and
other Afrocentrists, for at least three reasons. First, their arguments here
rest once more on unanimism, whereas any substantial case for New World
African ‘survivals’ necessarily depends on
demonstrating relationship
a

between particular Afro-American cultural traits and those of

particular
African peoples. Second, the Afrocentric programme depends on an
assertion that only Alrican-derived beliefs or
practices are (or should be) of
significance for people of African descent in the Americas. Again, no serious
scholar believes this: all note the historical facts of European, in many places
of Amerindian, and of
specifically ‘colonial’ or ‘creole’ cultural influences,
and above all of hybridity’ and syncretism. These multiple roots shaped even
slave-era African-American cultural forms, let alone the yet more
complex
and global influences on
contemporary, largely urban black America. Third,
it is
generally agreed that the identifiably African component within these

always compound cultures is on the whole smaller in the present United

States than in most other parts of the Americas, notably Brazil and the
larger Caribbean islands, for evident historical reasons, including greater
heterogeneity of slaves’
African origins, lower black-white ratios, and the

usually small size plantations. It may be added

of that neither Asante nor his
followers show any sign of close acquaintance with that mass of previous
literature on the subject.
In reality, however, Asante’s and other Afrocentrists’ insistence on the

purity, homogencity primordiality of African cultural

and influences among
Afro-Americans is not a historical or
sociological hypothesis, but a normative
assertion masquerading as a methodological imperative. To see different

parts of Africa as
having different cultural traits ‘is to commit a
major
intellectual crime’, says Asante (1990: 56). In parallel with (and in contra-

diction to) the attempts to establish historical proof for the Afrocentric
world-view’s claims is a dismissal of the whole notion of proof as Eurocentric,
and the substitution for it of an ill-defined concept of ‘soul as method’
(ibid.: 104-12). Apparently, ‘what this means is that history is relative, that

ethnography is biography, that definitions are

personal because the scholar
is engaged with the acquisition of knowledge in a social way’ (111).
Apart from the oxymoronic character of the last clause, the general
irrationalism here has, of course, many analogues in more academically
respectable quarters. In Asante’s work and in that of numerous
epigones, it
is linked to a
quite distinctive,
notion culture-bound
of ways of acquiring
knowledge. African-Americans supposedly learn and know reality through
emotion, symbolic imagery, and rhythm. For some proponents, this is
clevated into the dignity of an ‘affective epistemology’ (Schiele 1990: 154).
It is a view which harks back to some central if always internally contested —

claims of négritude and Haitian nowisme, though those earlier writers never

committed the absurdity of seeking to erect a

pseudo-scholarly methodoiogy
on its back. It is, equally evidently, a view consonant with many of the classic
claims of Euro-American racism about the ‘Negro personality’.
 AFROCENTRISM
234
Asante's thought also involves a fierce cultural ethnocentrism, a conten-

tion that Afrocentrism ‘studies every thought, action, behaviour, and value,
and if it cannot be found in our culture or in our history, it isdispensed
with quickly’ (1988: 5). As a supposed research strategy, this naturally leads
to wholly circular, self-confirming results:

Whether the researcher is exploring African Ainerican child-rearing prac-

tices in North Philadelphia or African kinship patterns among the Galla in
reconfirmauion and delinking in establishing
Ethiopia, are necessary steps
the Afrocentric focus of the work ... the process itself asserts the discipline
in the given project. (Asante 1990: 56)

Asante defines ‘reconfirmation’ as a by which ‘the scholar

process pursues
the organic, Diopian unity of African thought, symbols, and ritual concepts
to their classical (i.c. ancient Egyptian) origin’. Delinking, perhaps more
obviously, means dissociation from the ‘European intellectual project’
(ibid.).
Molefi Asante repeats often, and at great length, the claim that ‘Africalogy
is a discipline’: not interdisciplinary inquiry into the Afro-American experi-
ence, but ‘a separate and distinct field of study’ (1990: 140-42). Such an

assertion is
evidently useful when it comes to avoiding the standards of
rational inquiry and proof demanded in all established intellectual disci-

plines, not to mention its value to academic empire-building. But Asanie’s

thought does depend centrally on claims drawn
from specific academic
disciplines —
above all, on claims about history, although his writings never
engage with historical evidence as such. His various ouline accounts of
African historical
development, evidently dependent on
though they are

Diopian assumptions, are both confused and mythologizing. In an early

version he first asserts that ancient Egypt owed certain specific culture traits
to the south, to what he loosely calls Nubia: ‘The Nubians brought Egypt
the monarchy, a belief in divine kingship, and the worship of Horus and
other ancestors, thus greatly enriching the civilization’ (Asante 1985a: 5).
Then, a few lines below, Nubia did not ‘enrich’ Egypt; rather, Egypt was
wholly a Nubian creation. Egyptian civilization ‘sprang up in Nubia’s belly
and migrated to Egypt’ (ibid. 5). As for Egypt’s all-important influence on

the rest of Africa, this is seen as resulting from the Arab-Islamic invasions,
whose impact on Sub-Saharan Africa is vastly exaggerated and demonized.
The image of Arab incursions causing vast waves of disruption right across
the continent ~

presumably between the seventh and tenth centuries CE,

though Asante is notably vague about

chronology is pure fantasy: “The —

Arabs, with their thorough in their destruction

jihads, or holy wars,
were of
much of the ancient culture.’ This ‘total conquest’ and ‘historic persecution’
led to Egyptian priests spreading, often surreptitiously, right across the
continent, carrying their beliefs with them: ‘It is as if small bands keeping
just ahead of the Islamic onslaught managed to preserve certain aspects of
the traditional culture of Egypt’ among the Wolof, Yoruba, Asante, and so
 MOLEFI ASANTE: GODFATHER OF AFROCENTRISM 235

on (1985a: 5-6). Asante’s source for this peculiar view would seem to be
Chancellor Williams's Destruction of Black Civilization (1971/1987), which
sets out at great length a quite mythical ‘history’ of centuries-long
Arab-black race war. Asante has been repeating the same claims about
ancient history, both wild and derivative, for most of his career (see, for
instance, Asante 1980b, acknowledges its debts to Williams).
which at Icast
Asante is similarly cavalier about historical linguistics. Thus when he
wanted to assert the continuing centrality of African languages to black
American expression, he did not cngage with any of the complex evidence
on identifiable ‘Africanisms’ in Afro-American speech. Indeed, he showed
little sign of having read any of the relevant literature. Actual evidence was

an irrelevance to his case: ‘I want to contend that Black Americans retained

basic components linguistic experience rather
of the African than specific
artifacts’ (1985b: 235-6). Appeal to the notion of ‘linguistic experience’,
intangible, mysterious, independent of any specific linguistic feature, nat-
urally leaves Asante’s claims impossible to verify or refute."
Afrocentricity culminates in a kind of catechism, a series of numbered
statements forming ‘Njia, the Way’. Utterly random in construction, “The

Way’ comprises pseudo-historical claims, bits of mysticism, crackerbarrel

philosophy (‘Consider the racoon who washes before he eats; his example
is a piece of gold’ [1988: (13]), and advice on
personal behaviour all mixed

together in no apparent order. Njia makes no small claims for itself: “The

Way is neither poetry nor is it prose, yet it is both’ (ibid.: 116). The model
is clearly, more or directly, Garveyite; though without
less the residue of

rationality which Garvey’s similarly structured ‘African Philosophy’ con-

tained. And Asante’s call to arms could have come directly from any 1920s
Garveyite:

Up from the intelectual and spiritual pit which has held our mighty people!
Let cach person take his position in the vanguard of this collective conscious-
ness of Afrocentrism! Teach it! Practice it! And victory will surely come as we

carry out the Afrocentric mission to humanise the Universe. (1988: 6)

Asante attempts, both in Afrocentricity and in Kemet, to

provide a sort of

genealogy for his Diopstance. This derives above all from who,
ideological discussion
in Kemet, forms the starting point for a lengthy, meandering
of ancient Egypt’s legacies (43-104). This once more includes a
pseudo-
religious clement, claiming to come from recovery of the principles of the

Egyptian goddess Ma’at (80-96). Martin Bernal and, ridiculously, Albert

Churchward are also invoked as authorities on
Egypt (96-104), as is Karenga
(80-81, and in numcrous endnotes). Naturally, there are villains as well as

heroes, and they are drawn especially from the Arab and Islamic worlds:
traducers of Africa like the medieval North African historian
supposed great
Ibn Khaldun (62, 136); Ali Mazrui, who is alleged to be ‘Eurocentric’ and a

‘cynic’ driven wholly by jealousy of Diop, ‘a rival for African Islamic intellec-
tual hegemony’ (114); even Edward Said, who supposedly ‘bought into the
236 AFROCENTRISM

invisibility of Africa and has claimed classical Africa as a

part of the Orient’
(123). Prominent Afro-American scholars are rubbished, too —
thus Houston
Baker Henry Louis Gates are damned
and for attacking that ‘brilliant critic
and theorist’ Joyce A. Joyce, and ‘employing the most vile forms of Eurocen-
tric argumentation’ against her (147). There is a quite incoherent critique
of Marxism (169-79), though it is suggested (entirely without evidence) that
Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, before their premature deaths, were in
the process of shaking off the Marxist contagion and being ‘on the path to
an Afrocentric view of history’ (175). Fanon, indeed, ‘was clearly writing in
the tradition established by Garvey and Du Bois’ (179).*
It is that tradition to which Asante claims allegiance, presenting elsewhere
an eclectic lineage of precursors: Booker T. Washington (1988: 7-10);
Marcus Garvey, founder of ‘the most perfect, consistent, and_ brilliant

ideology of liberation in the first half of the twentieth century’ (ibid.: 10);
Elijah Muhammed (14-15); Du Bois (15-18); Malcolm X (18-19); and the

culminating figure, the John the Baptist to Asante’s Redecmer,® Karenga

(19-21). Asante’s ‘Njia’ ‘builds upon that foundation’. The stage was being
set for it ‘for over 100 years. Each level of awareness predictably led to the
manifestation of Njia’ (21). Njia, “The Way that came to Molefi in America’
(109), quotes extensively from Karenga’s ‘Kawaida’ doctrine.
Asante’s notion of what idiosyncratic to say the
constitutes a source is
least. Together politically inspirational figures presented in
with the list of

Afrocentricity, one may consider the more academic inventory of influences

which Asante and his wife Kariamu put forward in a bibliographical essay
for their Rhythms of Unity, The only things it has in common with the other
are its extreme eclecticism, and the fact that every entry on it is male.
Students of the Afrocentric approach are directed towards some fairly
predictable albeit —
often unreliable authorities: Diop and Obenga; J.A.
—

Chancellor Henrik Clarke, and the like. But they are

Rogers; Williams;John
also apprised of the merits of romantic (and indubitably European, not to
say Eurocentric) ethnophilosophers Placide Tempels and Marcel Griaule,
and of the fraudulent Zulu ‘witchdoctor’ and apartheid apologist Credo
Mutwa (Asante and Welsh Asante 1985: 254-9). Most bizarre is the praise
for Leo Frobenius: the Asantes call his work ‘an intellectual triumph... .

What is lacking in Frobenius is made up in the works of Diop. Obenga, and

Ki-Zerbo’ (ibid.: 255), Frobenius was indeed also a major influence on
Diop
and the others. But that just makes the matter more remarkable, given the
entirely outdated and profoundly flawed nature of the German’s work.
As Sidney Lemelle points out in a
sharp, Marxist-inflected critique, while
Asante purports to reject all European influences his thought actually falls
squarely within a
major European and, says Lemelle, —

Eurocentric —

philosophical tradition: idealism. He is a latter-day analogue of Hegel or

Carlyle, draped in a borrowed kente cloth:

Thus, at the base of Asante’s Afrocentric conceptualization is the primacy of

ideas over material reality. He claims that by using ‘ideas’ and ‘words’ to
 MOLEFI ASANTE: GODFATHER OF AFROCENTRISM 237

critique a society and its ruling ideology, his words will ... alter, indeed
create, another reality. (Lemelle 1994: 334)

Lemeille adds further charges: that Asante is an essentialist (undoubtedly

true by any understanding of that term), a male chauvinist (ditto), and a

utilitarian (ibid.: 334-6). By the last Lemelle seems to mean not a

disciple
of Jeremy Bentham, but someone who evaluates ideas only according to
their usefulness for some
specific project. In that sense, the charge sticks.
Asante has been prone to such claims as this:

To say that ‘such and such a

programme on television is a
good programme’
means that you have made an Afrocentric analysis. ... If the brother makes
that statement from an Afrocentric perspective, that is, if he asks if it is m the
best interest of Afrocentricity? then it becomes a conscious statement If not,
then he misunderstands the contextual nature of good and evil. (Asante
1988: 86-7)

Comment is probably superfluous, except maybe to wonder what ‘the sister’

might make of ‘the brother[’s]’ ‘conscious statement’.

Asante’s ambitions are considerable. Not only does he see himself as on a

mission to remodel the whole of the intellectual and academic worlds, but
he has entrepreneurial aspirations too. He has established his own
publish-
ing business, Asante Imprint Books, which has recently launched ‘the first
declared Afrocentric series of books for students in our schools’ (Asante
1995a: iv). The claims made for the series are Asante’s familiar ones, This is
to be ‘a profoundly Afrocentric endeavour’, not to be confused with others’
‘watered down version of multiculturalism in textbooks’, For the first ime:
‘teachers using Asante Imprint Books will have materials allowing to them
center themselves and their students within the culture, history and experi-
ences of African centeredness. Asante Imprint Books puts any reader of any

age on-line with the centric idea’ (ibid.: iv-v).

Encouragingly, though, the first vohime in the intended seres, Asante’s
own Classical Africa (1995a), does not partake of the wilder or more mystical
elements in Asante’s theorizing. Specialists might consider its picture of
ancient and precolonial African history romanticizing, often speculative and
highly elitist in its emphasis on
mighty monarchs and empires; but unlike
much of Asante’s and his collaborators’ work, it makes few historical claims
which they would judge to be clearly false. Asante highlights ‘six classical
civilizations of ancient Africa’: Kemet, Nubia, Axum, Mali, Ghana and

Songhay. In relation to the first two, it is asserted that the first Nile valley
civilization lay ‘around the modern city of Khartoum’ (1995a: 10) and that
‘ancient Egyptians looked
present-day more the like the Nubians than
Arabs’ (ibid.: 23): both highly suppositional affirmations, the
present-day
latter backed by a statement that ‘Egyptians today look much like African
Americans’, and a photograph of Asante himself with two modern Egypuans,
both darker than him. The reader is challenged: ‘Can you tell which is Dr.
238 AFROCENTRISM

Asante?’ (25). The standard Afrocentric dogma that Nubian civilization

preceded and created Egypt, however, is mercly implied, not stated
that of
as fact except by way of a quotation from John G. Jackson (53-70).
Descriptions of the glories of Axum (71-92), Ghana (93-110), Mali
(111-22) and Songhay (123-41) are all exaggerated, speculative and
The most
uncritical, but again they contain little obviously
fadseinformation.
evidently falsifiable assertions relate to medieval Timbuktu, wildly described
as ‘the greatest city in Africa and one of the greatest cities in the world in
the 13th century cr’ (111); and the sweeping judgement, following tn the
footsteps of Chancellor Williams’s myth of decline, that after the fall of

Songhay ‘there was

general instability throughout all of Africa’ (123). In
fact, as we have seen, there is little doubt that Timbuktu was outstripped in
size and significance by numerous other African urban centres, let alone
those on other continents; while there is no evidence that Songhay’s collapse
produced general instability even in its own
region, or that it had any
impact whatsoever in cast, southern or north Africa.
And even in his most ecumenical and emollient moods —
as in presenting
Afrocentricity nothing as programme more than a of educational reform,
one
operating in the legacy of the reformer and scholar Carter Woodson
rather than that of the separatist, nationalist tradition, and insisting that it
‘does not condone valorization at the of
other
ethnocentric
and is than
expense degrading
stone’
groups’ perspectives’, nothing more a ‘stepping
towards true multiculturalism (1991/1997: 290-91) — Asante insists on

associating that programme with questionabie and even unsustainable

claims. Even in that context, he urges that children must be taught such
‘true and accurate information’ as that ‘the first philosophers were the

Egyptians Kagemni, Khananup, Ptahhotep, Kete, and Seti’; that ‘African

civilizations predate all other civilizations’; and that ‘Africans visited and
inhabited North and South America long before European(s)" (ibid.: 293).

Notes

I. AmongAsante's many publications is a Book of African Names (1991c), designed to

offer inspirationto Afrocentric parents sceking appropriate appellations for their off
spring. The suggestions include numerous Arabic names —

bizarrely, given Asante’s

Arabophobia; presumably he includes them under the delusion that they are Swahili, Ann
duCille's comment on the whole exercise is apt:

In many traditional West

societies, African
naming is an essential postnatal rtual, a
communal culturalchristening a child a utero
event ... with the aid of a book of —

‘African names’ 1s
something akin to a sacrilege. Much the same
—
is true of the
Afrocentric practice whereby black adults rename themselves for many Ghanaians —,

the tdea of an adult male born on a Monday inadvertently naming himself Kofi (Friday)
rather than Kojo (Monday) is at once laughable and deeply lamentable. (duCille 1994;
28-9)

There ts, intriguingly, a character named Asante-Snith (a hypocritical, mtellectually

corrupt TV executive) in one of the finest and best-known Ghanaian novels, Ayi Kwer
Armahi's Fragments, first published im 1970.
 MOLEFI ASANTE: GODFATHER OF AFROCENTRISM 239

2. The term ‘Ebonics’ has subsequently gained quite wide currency, especially since
the School Board of Oakland, California decided in late 1996 that it should be recognized
as a distinct language —

which, they unwisely suggested, was geneucally wansmitted among

African-Americans —

and thus generated cnormous media controversy.

3. This m itself is a controversial term, since its usage can be held to imply (as in the
genetic model from which it derives) that originally ‘pure’ and distinct essences have
subsequently become mingled, | intend no such implication.
4. One of Asante’s admirers and former students, Dhyana Ziegler. argues explicitly
that Asante’s work cannot be understood or
fairly assessed unless the critics themselves
first adopt an Afrocentric world-view (Ziegler 1995b: 64).
5. For a more extensive and thoughtful Afrocentric critique of Marxist and liberal
historiography, warmly endorsed by Asante himself, see
Jean (1991). Further polemical,
highly coloured presentations of Afrocentric historical claims include A. Hilliard (1992)
and, with specific reference to school-level education, Hilliard (ed.) (1989).
6. Carolyn Calloway-Thomas (1995) notes Asante’s ‘penchant for a
religious vocabu-
Jary’ (13), and that The Afrocentric Idea ‘is an
evangelical document’ (12), but appears
rather to
approve of this than otherwise.
 18

The Network, the School and

the Fellow-Travellers

The twin of Afrocentrism defined and advocated by Asante

flagships as

are the African-American Department Temple University, Phila-

Studies at

delphia, of which Asante

Chairperson, and the
is Journal of Black Studies,
which Asante edits from Temple and whose contributors are
very heavily
drawn from the department's staff and graduate students. Reading the
Journal, and especially the contributions from past and present Temple
researchers, and disturbing of intellectual
one gets an overwhelming sense

conformism and, indeed, authoritarianism, Article after arti-

homogencity,
cle cites the same restricted list of sources, writers closely associated with
Asante and the Afrocentric movement, and often only they are cited.
Article after article begins and ends with a recital of quotations and
Asante’s work, declarations that his beliefs and metho-
paraphrases from
the author's thinking, assertions of the truth,
comprehen-
dology will guide
siveness, libcratory potential and superiority to all other approaches of
Asante’s ideas, The pattern varies little, whatever the specific subject matier
of the article. To describe the style as pious and the results as monolithic
would be considerable understatements. Almost the only, partial, exceptions
are the occasional special issues devoted to themes quite distant from
Asante’s main concerns and edited by people besides himself. One is
entitled to wonder whether the Journal would ever consider publishing a
contribution whose methodology or conclusions were to any significant
at variance with Asante’s, which failed to make ritual obcisance
degree or

to his authority.
Asante is unashamed of the intellectual homogencity he imposes.
quite
As he explained to New York Village Vorce journalist Greg Thomas:

of who's Afrocentric is the definition of

The only determination or not

which 1 It’s kind of foolish to example, for

Afrocentricity ~

developed. say,
that one is a Marxist and yet does not believe in the principles established by
Marx. Or that one is a deconstructionist and doesn’t believe in the principles
of Derrida. How can one
say they are an Afrocentrist if one does not accept
the fundamental basis of Afrocentricity as laid out in my works? That seems

to me to be a contradiction in terms. (Thomas 1995: 29)

 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 24]

He also described his approach as ‘the growing and dominant school of

thought in the African American studies field’, and remarkably, as if he

were President of some authoritarian state, condemned critics like Henry
Louis Gates and Kwame Appiah as
‘renegades’ (ibid.). One might expect
Asante to blow his own trumpet as hard as possible. What is more
surprising
isjust how hard, and how monotonously, others puff for him too. Fairly
typical examples include Jeffrey Lynn Woodyard’s ‘Evolution of a Discipline’
(1991), which sketches seven stages of development in African-American
studies. The earlier stages Woodyard identifies are uncontroversial and,
indeed, rather conventional, progressing from individual literary achieve-
ments under slavery, through the founding of black colleges and the
Harlem Renaissance, to the results of 1960s student militancy. The seventh
and latest stage, though, is the ‘presence of an
exemplar’ for African-
American studies (ibid.: 241). This exemplar, of course, is one Molefi K.
Asante, his ‘paradigm’ and his department:

It will suffice to acknowledge that reaction to the Afrocentric paradigm ...

suggests that it will function as the leading exemplar in the discipline.

Disciplinary status is assured for African American Studies so
long as the
Temple School of Afrocentrists and others can demonstrate its consistency,
durability, and praxis. (250)

Victor O. Okafor, in what purports to be an examination of Cheikh Anta

Diop's thought, actually devotes nearly half his space to an entirely uncritical
exegesis of Asante’s Kemet, proclaiming: ‘The following analysis applies the
protocols of Africalogical inquiry, as delineated’ in that work (Okafor 1991:
253). Nilgun Anadolu Okur, also of Temple, proclaims that since Asante
invented Afrocentrism ‘in his now classic book, Afrocentricity, the theory has
gained prominence in all academic circles the most important contri- ...

bution to Afrocentric theory is made in the major works of Asante’ (Okur

1993: 88-9). Ayele Bekerie, an Assistant Professor at (you guessed it)
Temple, effuses:

The idea of centeredness finds perhaps its most dynamic articulation and
movement in the theory and praxis of Afrocentricity.... This is the guiding

principle under which scholars of the Temple School, such as Asante and ...

more than 200 graduate students conduct their studies and research.

(Bekerie 1994: 131)

Clyde Ahmad Winters —

who, for the sake of variety, does not seem to be

affiliated Temple University
to says that the field ‘has been
—
outlined
excellently by Asante’ (Winters 1994: 170); and, in case that may not be

emphatic enough, entitles his article ‘Afrocentrism: A Valid Frame of

Reference’. Jerome Schiele, fairly typically, cites Asante’s work sixteen times
in an article fifteen long 1990); while Tolaghbe
pages Ogunicye
(Schiele
quotes Asante three times in his essay’s first paragraph alone, then gives the
242 AFROCENTRISM

master the last word too (Ogunleye 1997). One could go on fora very long
time multiplying instances of this alarmingly conformist and homogenizing
mode of academic work. Its intellectual authoritarianism, however, cannot

be better illustrated than

Temple's in After
the work of Victor Okafor.

proclaiming Africalogy ‘approves of Herodotus’s

that historiography’ we ~

are not told on what grounds and that any scepticism about Herodotus’s
—

claims can be motivated only by an attempt to deny Affica’s real role in

history (1991: 258), Okafor proceeds to a list of demands:

Africalogical research is expected to underscore the southern origin of the

Nile Valley civilization. It should stress the indigenous nature of the Nile

Valley achievements. Africalogists are expected to uphold the fact that

European-Africans never existed in antiquity. (ibid.: 260; emphasis added)

Cheikh Anta Diop, for all his faults, never ‘expected’ that people would
believe things simply because he, or Herodotus, said them.
The most remarkable expression of this hero-worship, however, is a

volume issued in 1995 under the

editorship of Dhyana Ziegler, entitled

Molefi Kete Asante and Afrocentnicity: In Praise and In Criticism. The title
misleads: contributions emit unmixed praise for Asante’s work and influ-
ence, with no substantive —
let alone negative
—

criticism at all. The nature

of the book is extremely unusual in terms of academic habits. When a

distinguished scholar retires or (more sadly) is felt to be near death or

senility, admirers, former students and

specialists in that writer's field often
come together to produce a festschrift, a work of tribute which usually
includes a few invocations of the great man or woman's influence, but

mainly consists of new contributions to the fields in which he or she has

worked. To offer a volume of unmixed laudation —

which, moreover,

includes very few substantive investigations as opposed to celebrations —

to a

writer still in mid-career, however, is, to put it bluntly, an act of sycophancy

almost unprecedented in academic circles.
The volume is topped and tailed by effusions from its editor, Dhyana
Ziegler. In the Preface, she urges that Asante has ‘unlocked the door to a

revolution in disciplinary inquiry, African scholarship, and American edu-

cation, to say the least’ (Ziegler [995a: ix). She goes on: ‘Asante’s wisdom
has touched the spirit of many who have embraced his wisdom, who have
allowed themselves to be challenged by his philosophy, and who have
opened their hearts to his energy and spirit’ (ibid.: xi). In her Conclusions,
redoubling the emphasis, she proclaims that Asante ‘has indeed been
blessed by his African ancestors with creativity, intelligence, and boldness’
(1995c: 275). In between, the guru is praised for ‘leaving his stamp of
excellence on everything he did without doubt one of the most
...
prolific
writers and gifted orators of the twenticth century’ (1995b: 60-62).
Numerous other contributors follow the same line. For Sandra Van Dyk,

Afrocentricityis ‘a demarcation point signalling the shift from an educational

paradigm of European cultural universalism to one of cultural pluralism’
 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL, AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 243

(1995: 2) critique of Eurocentrism

~
as if the were novel and unique to
Asante. Jeffrey Lynn Woodyard and Anita Mooijman both speak of the vast
political hopes supposedly opened up by Asante’s perspectives: ‘the discov-
ery and
restructuring of knowledge that will set us —
all of us —
freel’

(Woodyard 1995: 32). Tony Anderson exposes the ‘empty’ criticism of

Afrocentricity; focusing, rather oddly, on Mary Lefkowitz’s New Republic
article ‘Not Out of Africa’ (1992), which was actually an attack on Martin
Bernal rather than on Asante. For Anderson this seems to amount to a kind
of sneaky backdoor Eurocentrism, engaging with the white ‘Afrocentrist’
Bernal rather than the black originators. Deborah F. Atwater, addressing an

earlier phase in Asante’s career, clucidates his ‘brilliant contributions’ to

communications theory (1995: 45). Alan Jay Zaremba offers more personal
acclain for Asante’s qualities as a teacher and colleague. Hpri Geru-Maa
(one of several of Asante’s disciples to have adopted supposedly Egyptian
names) proposes to ‘develop’ Asante’s paradigm for an Afrocentric histori-
callinguistics, but in fact gives only an uncritical exegesis of Diop and
Obenga.
Accompanying the creation of an enclosed, self-validating circle of true

believers is the necessary complement: a sense that the circle is under

attack. Bekerie (1994: 132) claims that ‘a low-intensity intellectual warfare
is in progress almost on a
global scale.... Initial attempts to crush

Afrocentricity did not succeed. The strategy of its opponents now is to

attempt to wrest control of the movement.’ Winters worries that the enemy
is focusing its assaults on the dead Pharaoh, Diop: “To attack Afrocentrism,
the resisters are
attacking the great research of Cheikh Anta Diop ... who
laid the foundations for the Afrocentric idea in education’ (1994: 171).
Occasionally, to be fair, Asante has seemed to evince a more pluralist
attitude to inquiry, but one with an odd sting in the tail. Thus the book he
co-edited with his wife, Kariamu Welsh Asante, African Culture (1985),
contained contributions whose arguments were
quite at odds with the
editors’ beliefs. They included one from Wole Soyinka (1985) insisting on

very sharp divisions between ‘Black Africa’ and the Arab north: a distinction

contradicting basic Diopian faith. Aguibou Y. Yansane, discussing precolon-

ial West African emphasized their cultures’
states, indigencity, and made no
mention of Egyptian origins or influences (Yansane 1985). Maulana Kar-

enga (1985) presented a basically Marxist account of African intellectuals’

political choices. The oddity is that Asante, in his cditorial comments,

sought to present cach of these contributions as if they supported his kind

of Afrocentrism rather than fundamentally contradicting it.
Such seemingly inherent authoritarianism and pseudo-traditionalism
brings Afrocentricity into some odd collusions with the ideas of both
colonial rulers and
postcolonial African tyrants. Thus Harvey Sindima, a

researcher at Colgate University, quotes with entire approval the lament of

a 1913 official report from British Central Africa that young people ‘have in
recent years evinced an inclination to
emancipate themselves from the

disciplinary responsibilities of village life and obedience to authority’

244 AFROGENTRISM

(Sindima 1990: 192). British colonial administrators and at least some

modern Afrocentrists can, it seems, unite —

at any rate in their shared

detestation of liberalism. Asante has disparaged the idea of freedom of
and of the which allegedly stems from the “Western
expression press,
African ideal of
conflict view’ of
society (Asante 1980a: 27). The harmony,
by contrast, recognizes that such freedoms are ‘not objective relative’, but
and negates ‘the overextended concept of freedom of the press’ (ibid.: 25).
Africans do not understand when news media attack the government: ‘when
the traditional cultural patterns emphasize and dictate that the
harmony
propagation of news
speak for the royal court’ (ibid.: 26).
Yet more nakedly authoritarian is the Afrocentric psychologist Joseph A.
Baldwin. His belief that race ‘constitutes the most basic and fundamental

binding condition underlying human existence, and ultimately wanscends

all subsequent or secondary bonds’ (1980: 98) is ‘illustrated’ by examples
including ‘the Jews’ false claims to African land’ (ibid.: 103).! Baldwin goes
on:

Another relevant illustration of this problem involves the furor, primarily in

the white community, over the ‘moral character’ of former President Idi
Amin of Uganda it ... is clear that the European community is committed to

creating (in the minds of black people) a

conception of Brother Amin as the
most evil, destructive and ‘dangerous’ individual that this universe has ever

witnessed.

In Baldwin's eyes, such attack on ‘Brother Amin’ is simply a racial con-

spiracy. No European should have the ‘audacity to question the moral

character of any non-European, given their own immoral and destructive

history’. By contrast: ‘the masses of our

people in Africa appear to hold
Brother Amin in the highest esteem’ (ibid.: 103). No evidence is given, or

could be given, for that assertion. Brother Amin is an African, all Africans
are of the same mind, all are virtuous, and all Europeans seek to malign
them. Therefore the butcher of Kampala is an honourable man.
QED,
Dispiritingly, ideas of this kind also seep into the ‘African History’ and
‘Black Holocaust’ volumes of the usually excellent cartoon-strip Beginner's
Guides which
series, provide popular introductions to a wide range of

heavyweight subjects. The African volume (Boyd 1991) engages in some

fairly wild claims about homogencous, solidaristic African world-views, and

cites Ben-Jochannen and Van Sertima among its recommended authorities.
The Black Holocaust for Begmners (Anderson 1995) is a questionable work in
more various ways. Its very tile naturally raises hackles in some circles,
seeming as it does to engage in a distasteful kind of African—Jewish

competition over the status of historical victimhood. Its opening pages,

somewhat irrelevantly to the main theme of the Atlantic slave trade, rehearse
and grandiose claims
2 about ancient African civilizations long predat-
vague their trade with the Americas and
ing Mesopotamian or Egyptian states,
Australia, and so on (ibid.: 8-15, 25-8). It is claimed that the Dravidians of
 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 245

India were Africans (30). The numbers involved (killed or

transported) in
both Arab and Atlantic slave trades are
grotesquely inflated -
the former to

at least 28 million (41), the latter to anywhere between 100 and 270 million
~

and it is quite falsely asserted that historians W.E.B. Du Bois, Basil

Davidson, Cheikh Anta Joseph Inikori and Walter Rodney support
such wild claims (159).2
Diop,
And the book exhibits a sheer carelessness of

production quite absent from earlier volumes in its series, with a mass of
typographical, literal and factual errors.
The necessarily self-confirming nature of the Afrocentric approach is well
demonstrated in a supposedly empirical, even scientific, study of ‘Afrocen-
tric Cultural Consciousness and African-American Male-Female Relation-
ships’ by three Florida researchers (Bell, Bouie and Baldwin 1990), It starts

world-views, a Euro-American and

by counterposing two supposed one an

African-American one, The former is characterized by individualism and a

drive to ‘through competition, aggression, materialism,

mastery domination
and power, oppression, independence, and the transforming and rearrang-
ing of objects in nature’ (ibid.: 163). All this is naturally reflected in
heterosexual relationships, which are governed by ‘power, competition,
material affluence, and physical gratification’ (ibid.). The African world-
view, by contrast, emphasizes ‘oneness with nature’ and ‘survival of the

group’, giving rise to relationships stressing ‘spiritual-communal character

qualitics’, where ‘each partner provides for the other’s physical, intellectual,
emotional, and social stimulation’. Such relationships are ‘inspirational’,
‘mutually affirmative’, ‘visionary’, ‘committed to goals, accomplishments,
and aspirations that are related to the survival and development of the
Black family’, Couples ‘celebrate themselves, their achievements, aspira-
tions, and developments as African people’ (169-71). All the foregoing is
‘proved’ by citations exclusively from the little band of Afrocentric academ-
ics, primarily Asante and the article’s
co-authorJoseph Baldwin.
So much for theory; now for research. A sample of 88 men and 89 women
—
we arc not given a coherent account of how they were selected was —

tested against an ‘African SelfConsciousness Scale’ developed by Baldwin,

to see how they measured up to the Afrocentric values previously described.
The same
group was also tested on their attitudes to heterosexual relations,
including such questions as whether respondents agreed or
disagreed with
the statement: ‘In mate selection and/or cvaluation, Black men and Black
women should consider Black cultural beliefs and values (or cultural
consciousness) as a main or
primary criterion’ (175). They also involved
scenarios in which: ‘The Afrocentric alternative involved being totally
supportive of the mate in hardship, while the Eurocentric alternatives
ranged from partial to total withdrawal of support’ (176).
withholding/
The analysed with correlational
data were and chi-square procedures,
with the ‘Pearson product moment correlation coefficient’, and so on

(176-80). It sounds impressively professional, until one recalls the basic

tenet of all statistical and computing techniques GIGO: garbage in, -—

garbage out. The results? ‘Afrocentric cultural consciousness is positively

246 AFROCENTRISM

related to
perceptions (values, attitudes) that prioritize an Afrocentric value
orientation in Black heterosexual relationships’ (185). It is as obvious a

tautology as one can well imagine.

Sadly, this kind of writing is not atypical —
it stands out only in its unusually
energetic effort to appear conventionally scholarly. Overall, pious the

judgement of Bayo Oyebade, another researcher in Asante’s department, is

wildly misplaced:

Afrocentricity insists that investigation of Africanphenomena must be ...

research. For those who confuse

Afrocentricity with
subjected to proper
it as a reincarnation of Négritude, this
Négritude, those who tend to sce

insistence on meticulous research distinguishes it.... To the extent that

Afrocentricity rejects undue glorification of Africa, it goes beyond Négritude.

(Oyebade 1990: 237)

The main Afrocentrists have university posts, but their work has little to
do with ‘meticulous research’, Not infrequently, articles in the Journal of
Black Studies slip into a mixture of New Age and ethnophilosophical
mysticism, as with Adekotunbo Knowles-Borishade's invocation of a
sup-
posed classical African oratical mode derived directly from ancient
Egyptian
sources (1991: 488) and inspired by ‘Nommo’: ‘The metaphysical principle
behind the
power of Nommo is
vibratory nature,its which becomes

multiplied in strength by the psychic energy imparted by the Caller’ (ibid.:

496). Other recent works mingle Afrocentric and New Age romanticisms to

make yet more

sweeping claims for the power of ancient African wisdom to

heal the troubles of the present. Thus Linda James Myers, in Understanding
an.
Afrocentric World View, proclaims a ‘reasoned faith (positive belief) in the
achievement of everlasting peace and happiness based on the teachings
...

of ancient 1988:
Africans’(Myers v).
Jerome H. Schiele, in an article claiming to present Afrocentric

approaches to organization theory, proposes that such approaches offer a

unique framework for ‘human-service organizations’. According to this
framework, ‘organizational and group survival replaces productivity as the
overriding concern’ (Schiele 1990: 150). There ‘would be no need to

practice rigid supervision and control’ (ibid.; 154); organizations ‘would

not place so much emphasis on efficiency or rationality’ (155). ‘(T)he
strengthening of interpersonal relationships in an organization would be
perceived as an end im itself” (156). Or in other words, the ‘Afrocentric
paradigm’, despite the disclaimers Schiele hastily inserts, would sanction —

or
positively value a notion —
of public service organizations as. self-
perpetuating, cosy, inefficient, irrational and unproductive bureaucracies.
Such a stance is beyond parody. In a companion piece suggesting the
implications of Afrocentricity for higher education, Schiele proceeds by way
of the familiar Diopian antitheses between European individualism, compet-
a model
itiveness, aggression, and so on, and African humanism to propose

of education ‘based on traditional African philosophical assumptions’

 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 247

(Schiele 1994: 152), among which is apparently that ‘there is no

perceptual
separation of the individual from other people’ (ibid.: 154)
—

which must

be a bit confusing when one is trying to eat, or

put on one’s shoes.” The
actual implications for education seem to be that tutors and students should
be nice to one another, should co-operate, and should be eager to learn
(155-8). This is certainly a
powerful blow against all those philosophies of
education that advocate rudeness and idleness as the ideal pedagogical
tools."
The idea that present-day systems of education, philosophy, governance,
psychiatric counselling, and so on can and should be drawn from sources in
ancient Egypt or ‘classical Africa’ recurs
regularly. Maulana Karenga and
his collaborator Jacob Carruthers (Karenga 1985; Karenga and Carruthers
1986) have proposed it in relation to politics and philosophy. Asa Hilliard,
like Schiele, thinks educational models can be drawn from Kemitic wisdom
(Hilliard 1986, 1989, 1994b). Afrocentric mathematician Deborah Maat
Moore has even claimed in interview very that the reading act of Ancient

Egyptian hicroglyphs ‘cleansing’, morally and spiritually uplifting (Person-

is

Lynn 1996: 146). We shall look later at parallel claims made in relation to

science and technology.

Despite Asante’s pre-eminence, undoubtedly the most powerfully argued,

as well as most extensive, presentation of the essential general features of an
Afrocentric world-view is a recent, massive book by Marimba Ani (formerly
Dona Richards: her renaming may seem to some a touch immodest, since
‘Ani’ is an Ancient Egyptian word for a bearer of wisdom!). In Yurugu (Ani
1994) she sets out a
sweeping, heavily documented critique of the entire
structure of Western thought and behaviour. Her title comes from a
Dogon
legend of a doomed, destructive, incomplete being, the rejected offspring
of the Creator. This, of course, is her image of the European: the irony
being that her source for the Dogon story is a European writer, Marcel
Griaule. Ani's book has the dubious merit of carrying its relentless pursuit
of racialized thinking to logical conclusions within its own structure, by
having two separate Bibliographies and Indexes one for ‘Africans’,
—

one

for others. This gross intellectual apartheid has certain logical difficulties,
of course; its fencing off of ‘Africans’ (actually including hardly any African
as
opposed to Afro-American authors) seems to contradict the book’s
central claim that the basic division lies between Europeans and everybody
else. In fact, though, it is the segregation of the Index which best reflects
Ani’s preoccupations, for like almost all her fellow Afrocentrists she has not
the slightest interest in Asian, Middle Eastern, Oceanic, Australasian or

Native American peoples. Her ‘Non-African’ Bibliography includes just one

name from any of these groups: the American Indian writer Vine Deloria.

Seventy per cent of the world’s people are as irrelevant to her as they
allegedly are to Eurocentric thinkers. But categorization has further,
her
rather predictable problems. W.E.B. Du Bois, among many people of mixed
descent, is placed in the ‘African’ Index and Bibliography, with scant regard
for the French and Dutch ancestry of which he was actually rather proud.
248 AFROCENTRISM

Also typically, Marimba Ani appears to be quite uninterested in Africa

itself. She makes much of her conceptual scheme and analytical tools being
drawn from African thought, using concepts like ‘Utamawazo’ (roughly,
world-view), ‘Asili? (cultural essence) and ‘Utamahoro’ (vital force) —

though, confusingly, she also tells us that

thing. these three are all the same

All three are Swahili sign of knowing that language,

words, but Ani shows no

still less of being concerned about the sheer variety of peoples who use it,
its substantially Arabic origins, or its development in large part as a medium
for slave-trading: Iet alone worrying how far its concepts are translatable
into other African languages. Occasionally, she throws in Yoruba, Twi and
other terms as well. But beyond some rather routine denunciations of South
African policies already well out
-

of date before the book was

published —

she has nothing whatever specific to say about Africa, or manifestations of

the European ‘Utamawazo’ there.
None the less, Ani's book has real strengths in comparison with almost all
the other literature of Afrocentrism. She has read widely, worked (as she
tellsus) for at least sixteen years on the manuscript —

indeed, the book's

major ideas appear embryo as Richards

in (1980) —

and offers rhetorically

powerful if —

relentlessly reductionist —

readings of aspects of Western

thought from Plato onwards. All this is vitiated, however, by indiscriminate

indulgence towards the wildest claims and theories, so

long as they are

sufficiently hostile to the ‘Western worldview’: the racist ideas of Frances

Cress Michacl Bradley Richard King; the charge that AIDS is
Welsing, or a

deliberately created disease, a

genocidal plot against Africans (Ani 1994:
437-46) or that the Nazi Holocaust was far less destructive than European
colonialism, and arouses condemnation only because the victims were white

(ibid.: 418).
Quite apart from the wild totalizations in claiming all world
involved

history as determined by opposition between homogencous

a
European
culture which incarnates all evil, and an
equally homogeneous ‘everyone
else’ embodying all virtue, Ani’s book depends on a quite unsustainable
counterposition of the concepts of logic, abstraction, analysis, individualism,
materialism and rationalism destructive)
(all seen against as
European, and
those of spirituality, intuition,
holism, love, collectivism, and so on, identi-
fied with non-European ‘majority cultures’? In other words, Ani is an anti
universalist in all three of the senses set out above (pp. 11-12). She sees
African world-views as governed by an alternative, superior, non-Aristotelian
‘logic’:

The universe through phenomenal interaction,

is understood which pro-
duces images, which in and
turn communicate truths.
powerful symbols
‘Diunital logic’ indicates that in African thought a thing can be both A and
not A at the same time... ‘diunital logic’ can be understood as the

recognition and affirmation of the ambiguity and multidimensionality of

What is contradictory in Euro-American Aristotelian
phenomenal reality.
logic is not contradictory in African thought. (97-8)
 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 249

Such claims as Ani's could come only from someone who —

without
without moment's
philosophical training and, far worse, having given a
serious thought to the question of what ‘logic’ means has glibly —

swallowed
cultural relativist claims that the idea of logic is
postmodernist or extreme

intrinsically culture-bound. The best response to this is in the words of a

and genuinely philosophical, African thinker, Kwasi Wiredu. He

genuine,
deplores:

the well-intentioned but unwelcome plea, entered on behalf of Africa by

some of her friends, that although African thinking does not operate with
such Noncontradiction and Excluded Middle, it is none the
principles as

worse for if, since there quite simple consideration

are alternative logics ... a

suffices to demonstrate that no coherent logical system or even logical

thinking is possible that dispenses not just with some particular formulation
but with the essence of the principle of Noncontradiction.... If a given
the notion of valid deduction
system does not have this principle must
...

consequently be absent. (Wiredu 1992: 304-5)°

Does Marimba Ani go shopping, and expect to be able to add up her bill?
If she asks someone the time, does she expect to be told ‘Ten am., and

three-thirty p.m.’, maybe

or ‘I don’t
recognize conception of the lincar
time, Ma'am: go ask
somebody European’ (sec Ani 1994: 59-62)? In her
book's Acknowledgements, she is engagingly honest about the limits to

her computer literacy; but presumably when she hits the ‘A’ key, she expects
her screen to show an ‘A’, rather than ‘both A and not-A’. One might
moreover ask: if Ani believes that categories like logic, abstraction and the

analytical are inherently Eurocentric, why has she burdened her book with
a huge apparatus of (mostly accurate) references, and why does she attempt
to argue for the propositions she advances? Why not rest content with a
of affective writing, appealing only to the emotions indeed,
piece purcly or,
to the authority of the ancestors?
Another major theme in Afrocentric historical or
pseudo-historical — —

is the African in pre-Columbian America. Ivan

writing supposed presence
Van Sertima, in They Came Before Columbus (1977), claims two major patterns
of voyaging, The ancient Egyptians and Nubians went to the Gulf of Mexico
—

carrying with them everything from the art of pyramid-building to that of

writing (though apparently forgetting to pass on the idea of the wheel
either to Americans or to Sub-Saharan Africans). Rather later, the Mande
of West Africa travelled to Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Columbia, Peru and
various Caribbean islands.
oddity The in their case is that very soon

thereafter they not only forgot

to navigate or build ocean-going craft,
how
irritated selfdisgust at this absentmindedness) retreated to
but (perhaps in
live well away from the coast. Van Sertima’s grab-bag of evidence for such
culture contact amounts mainly to a superficial and highly selective list of

alleged similarities between Egyptian and Mesoamerican cosmologies, archi-

tectures, and so on, claims that several early European voyagers to the
250 AFROCENTRISM

Americas ~

including Columbus himself -

observed black-skinned people

already there, and the observation that some Olmec sculpture depicts
people with thick lips. From the side, the
African main supposed evidence
is a possible tradition (very weakly attested) that two large fleets of ships
the of Abubakar in the
from the Malian Empire, during reign IH early
fourteenth century, sailed westward and never returned.
Van Sertima is not by any means the only person advocating ideas of early
African voyages to the Americas (almost simultaneously an imaginative
amateur historian, Barry Fell, was
putting forward similar theories (Fell
19'76)), and has indeed sought more conscientiously to argue from evidence
than some enthusiasts have done. This generally rational approach was,

however, confused or undermined in They Came Before Columbus by the

dramatizing, even fictionalized, narrative style he adopted there: though a

decade later (in Van Sertima 1987) he sought to defend the approach and,
with a number of collaborators, to produce new arguments for the original
claim. He found support from the veteran German art historian and Mexico

city museum curator Alexander von Wuthenau (von Wuthenau 1987), and
sought to resurrect the memory of a
neglected precursor in the field, Leo
Wiener (1862-1939), best known as a translator of Tolstoy and as father of
Norbert, the founder of cybernetics. In 1919-22 Wiener produced a massive
three-volume attempt at documentation of the alleged African discovery of
America (see Muffet 1987).” In reviving that tradition, Van Sertima (1987:
15-17) distanced himself from the wilder ideas of amatcur historians like

Rafique Jairazbhoy, who had argued that the Egyptians founded the Olmec
culture, whereas Van Sertima only asserted that Africans m/fluenced it. None
the less, in his later edited volume Van Sertima still found space for

sweepingly speculative claims like those of Beatrice Lumpkin about alleged

influences of Egyptian pyramid-building on vaguely similar American struc-

tures (Lumpkin 1987), or Keith Jordan’s sketchy and entirely unscientific

arguments from physical anthropology (Jordan 1987). Van Sertima is more

cautious and coherent in his procedures than most Afrocentric writers (and
is clearly disapproved of by many of them"), but the friendly assessment of
St Clair Drake greatly exaggerates in suggesting that he ‘present[s] a

convincing case.... There is little to which his peers in “the academy”

could object in his book’ (Drake 1987: 312). And as Drake concedes, such
a defence could not be mounted in relation to many of Van Sertima’s
collaborators Journal of African Civilizations:
on the ‘who have used folklore
and mythology, along with esoteric types of language analysis, in ways that
raise questions about the scholarly character of their intellectual operations’
(ibid.).°
Of course, the cynic might suspect that the only real question in all this is
how the doughty African explorers found room to land, since America's
beaches were
jostling with so many pre-Columbian visitors: St Brendan and
his Irish monks, Prince Madoc on his way to found colonies of Welsh-

speaking Indians," Carthaginians and Phoenicians (see Bradley 1992a:

15-20), Vikings -

some of them African, too, as a contributor to another

 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 251

book edited by Van Sertima asserts (Rashidi 1985: 258) —

and King Arthur’s

knights. More scriously, it might be concluded that whereas most historians

find the evidence for pre-Columbian Viking in the Americas
settlement
very
convincing, the case for African voyages if any is little
less speculative - -

than the older stories about Brendan or Madoc: lack of scholarly acceptance
for it cannot be attributed solely, or even mainly, to racial or Eurocentric
prejudice.
Fantasies of this kind have, evidently, an
unquenchable polymorphous-
ness. In 1978 —

to take one of the more bizarre examples a book was —

published in
Paraguay, by endorsed members of the country’s semi-fascist
military regime, arguing that Paraguay’s Ache Indians were degenerate
descendants of the Vikings (Holland 1990), But Van Sertima also has more

reputable company than that of Latin American generals. Remarkably,

renowned cultural critic bell hooks seems uncritically to accept Van
Sertima’s claims about African—Amerindian contact. She draws great politi-
cal hope from this encounter, since it was
supposedly a
non-imperialist one,
in which the participants did not make ‘a site of imperialist/cultural
domination’ out of their differencescultural (quoted in Gross and Levitt
1994; 211). Nigerian poet polemicist Chinweizu,
and too, takes the truth of
Van Sertima’s flaky claims for granted, and also finds positive political
lessons in them: ‘I find it somehow inspiring to learn that there was fruitful
cultural exchange between Africans and Amcricans long before the coming
of Europeans to both places, and I think we should all know more about it
(1987: 93). In fact Van Sertima’s and his co-thinkers’ fantasies are not of
‘culuural exchange’ they give -
no
sign that they think their African
adventurers learned anything from the native Americans but are simply ~

another aspect of compensatory African-American aggrandizement. Indeed,

Bruce Trigger is surely nearer the mark when he says that Van Sertima
‘denigrates, we trust unwittingly, native peoples by attributing major ele-
ments of their cultural heritage to others’ (1989: 407).
Equally surprising, Lerone Bennett, in Before the Mayflower, his massively

popular history of black America, quotes Van Sertima without demur,

accepting his ill-evidenced claim that ‘there was extensive pre-Columbian
contact between ancient Africa and the Americas’ (Bennett 1984: 4). This
is a
departure from the generally cautious and sober way in which Bennett's
work (very much an
example of the ‘contributionist’ strand of historical
retrieval) uses others’ research on the distant past.
Matching the claims made about African influences in the pre-Columbian
Americas are similar assertions of widespread African colonization in

Europe.'! Van Sertima pack leads the here too, with his edited collection

African Early Evrope (1985). The contributions

Presence in range from pious
litle biographical sketches of figures like Alexander Pushkin and_ the
Chevalier de Saint-Georges, through effusions on “The Moor: Light of
Europe’s Dark Ages’ (illustrated with obviously nineteenth-century drawings
claimed to be of much greater age), to arguments asserting the African
origins of Europe’s carly historic populations.
252 AFROCENTRISM

Like most of the other central notions of Afrocentrism, this last, a varied
set of ideas about African origins for European peoples and civilizations,
has a much older history. The major originators in this instance appear to

be two late-Victorian British writers, Gerald Massey and David MacRitchie.

Both Massey’s and MacRitchie’s books have been reissued by African-
American enthusiasts, and have become highly influential texts for the
Afrocentric movement!” Runoko Rashidi
251-2) tells of his ‘intense
(1985: he
search’ for MacRitchie’s ‘exceedingly rare’ book, and the sacrifices
incurred to find it. It is a touch poignant to note that, by contrast, the copy
of MacRitchie in Oxford’s Bodleian Library has sat apparently unread for
over a century: when | consulted it there, the pages were still uncut.

Gerald Massey (1828-1907) of an impoverished canal

was the son

boatman from England. Deprived of formal education,

Hertfordshire, he
became a noted autodidact, a prolific if undistinguished poct, and

campaigner for both Spiritualism and Christian Socialism often cited as —

the inspiration for George Eliot’s felix Holt, the Radical. He was also yet
another of the era’s enthusiasts for the Egyptian origins of absolutcly
everything. His Book of the Beginnings (1881) traced at massive length the
alleged colonization of prehistoric England by Egyptian settlers, who built

Stonehenge and the British Isles’ other ancient monuments, provided the
religious beliefs and cultural practices of the people still to be discerned —

in many surviving customs of evident Egyptian origin and contributed -

much to the English language. The longest section of Massey's first volume
provided a huge list of English words supposedly derived from Ancient

Egyptian, while the second volume ‘uncovered’ similarly extensive Egyptian

influences on Hebrew, Assyrian and extraordinarily enough —

the New —

Zealand Maori languages.

MacRitchie's Ancient and Modern Britons was issued anonymously in 1884.
His basic theory was that large parts of the British population had originally
been what he called ‘Melanochroi’, descendants of the interbreeding of
white Europeans with black ‘Australoids’. These latter had been the first
Britons, and were
supplemented by later ‘black’ migrants, notably black
Huns, Moors and Danes. Pure-blooded blacks no
longer, of course, existed
in Britain (ignoring, as MacRitchie did, the migrant and settler enclaves in
various Victorian seaports), but MacRitchie
British found evidence of their

presence all over the place, especially in Scotland with Galloway the most —

prolific hunting-ground. They built ancient stone circles, dolmens, and so

on. Folktales and customs kept their memory alive. Every place-name and
family name with ‘black’, ‘dark’, and related words in it, or any hint of
them, indicated African descent: thus not only surnames like Black, Brown,
Dunn or Gray, but the Celtic Dougal, Carr, Douglas, Donn, Murray (from
‘Moor’) and many, many more (or Moore) were
living witness to African
ancestors.

A little later our old friend Albert Churchward, in his Origen and Evolution

of the Human Race. was not only tracing Egyptian influence in Northern

Europe, including claims that the Inuit were black (1921: 416-25), but
 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 253

asserting that the Chinese were descended from Egyptians (ibid.: 367-71),
that Piltdown Man was a ‘Nilotic
Negro’ (34-46, 497-9) and that the British
Isles were settled first by Pygmies, then by more ‘Nilotic Negroes’ (462-6).
There are some even more eccentric recent footnotes to this view, like
Ahmed and Ibrahim Ali's little book The Black Celts (1993), which also
purports to trace ancient African civilizations in Britain and Ireland," The
Alis bring to bear an
impressive, if utterly indiscriminate, mass of data —

folkloric (ibid.: 14-51), (104-5, 127-78), plus a mass of ‘evidence’

from the analysis of skulls linguistic (64-5, 69-70, '77~84, 87-103) and blood groups
(111-26) to argue that
-—

before the Celts came to the British Isles, the

archipelago was inhabited by various African peoples. These diverse groups
—

allegedly all originating in Ethiopia, though migrating via Spain and

various parts of North Africa —
have left their traces everywhere from stone

circles to round skulls of supposedly distinctively African type. There is the

predictable charge that all this has been hushed up: ‘Modern archaeoligst
(sic) and historians ignore the Afro—Iberian colonisation of Britain and
Ireland’ (57). Perhaps the wildest set of claims, however, is made im a text

evidently designed high-school for They in students, What Never Told You

History Class (1983) by a Bronx (New York) maths teacher writing under the
name Indus Khamit Kush. Drawing indiscriminately on the whole pantheon
of Afrocentric ‘authorities’ from Volney, Churchward and Massey, through
the ‘old scrappers’ Jackson, James, Rogers, Clarke and Ben-Jochannen to
Diop and Van Sertima, Kush asserts that the original inhabitants and bearers
of civilization the entire black Africans the
across
globe were first Japanese —

(ibid.: 207), Vietnamese, Siamese and Malays (209), Greeks (228-9),

Romans (232-4), Spanish (234-5), Britons (238-40) and Americans
(243-7).
Writings in this vein -

dominated today by Ivan Van Sertima and _ his

followers, but with their much older and often highly whimsical ancestry
—

have a rather different and in some ways less exclusivist focus from those of
most Afrocentric currents, Rather than asserting the uniqueness, superiority
and self-sufficiency of supposedly African traditions or world-views, they seek
traces of ancient African influence everywhere in the world. Thus they
might open the way to a more ecumenical, multidirectional vision of world
history, one free of the reverse racism of much Afrocentric dogma (and
certainly the overt bigotries of many other prominent writers in the genre,
like anti-Semitism, are absent from Van Sertima's work). Van Sertima has
indeed registered sharp dissent from those like a contributor to his own
-

edited works, Manu Ampim judge by —

who seem to ideas their authors’

racial background. Intellectual be subjected to the melanin work ‘cannot

dosage test’, and criticism of white scholars is of valuc ‘only where it

pinpoints specific errors of fact, specific conceptual contradictions’ (1994a:

11). Van Sertima’s Journal of African Civilizations has occasionally published
the work of white scholars, whereas several other journals and publishing
houses in the field appear to operate a de facto colour bar on contributors.
Van Sertima insists that his Afrocentrism is intended only as a balancing
 AFROCENTRISM
254
corrective to Eurecentrism in education, not as a counter-myth (Person-
1996: 32). If all of in measure of African descent and
Lynn
—

us are some

far more recently so than via ‘Lucy’ or ‘Eve’ —

and all our cultures include

African influence, then racisms of any kind have no
_ historical basis.

Unfortunately, though, the cultural model proposed by the Journal of African

Civilizations, or by Temple University’s Afrocentrists, is not one of multidirec-
ional influence, but one in which everything radiates from Africa.

However, there are a few straws in the wind to suggest the possibility of
an academic Afrocentrism which eschews fantasy and reverse racism, A

considerably more coherent, less dogmatic approach to understanding

history than Asante’s (or those of most of the better-known Afrocentric
writers) is provided by his Temple colleague C. Tsehloane Keto, South
African-born Keto thus conforms to the gencral rule that the wilder reaches
of identitarian cultural nationalism are rarely to be found occupied by
African, as
opposed to Afro-American, intellectuals. Keto expounds Asante’s
pet notion of ‘centredness’ in relatively muted -
albeit still essentialist —

fashion: ‘researchers should specify, at the level where they apply their
chosen methodology on concrete situations, the geographical and cultural
location that they adopt as the primordial core from which they extrapolate
values and 1989: 1). He asserts Asante does in his
priorities’ (Keto as more
—

emollient moods —

that Afrocentrism aims to be a balance, rather than a

hegemonic alternative, to Eurocentrism (ibid.: 3), For that matter, a non-

hegemonic Eurocentric historical practice possible, Keto cites, in a rather

is

arbitrary-sounding list, such names as William Appleman Williams, Harold

Cruse and Sande Cohen (11-13). A ‘symbiotic’ relationship to Marxism,
and an alliance with concern for gender issues, rather than Asante's blanket

hostility to both, are

proposed (21-2, 16-18). Afrocentrists in the USA are

via metaphor borrowed, unacknowledged, from Du Bois to

suggested
—
—
a

be making a constructive contribution to debate on America’s future rather

The final is kind of universal
than opting out from it (31-2). goal some

pluralism (40-42), and in what may well be read as a

warning to his
Afrocentric colleagues, Keto urges:

The lure of only a temptation to European

hegemony is centred
not

scholarship. Theperspective can also carry hegemonic under-

Afrocentric
tones when all claims to progress in all regions of the world are
explained in
terms of the African presence and the African presence alone. This hege-
monic tendency, though ego-boosting to people whose egos have been

historically pounced on, should be rejected. (17)

Keto’s emphases are a valuable corrective to the dogmatism of much

Afrocentric writing. He does not, however, appear to have produced any
substantive historical
exemplifying studies his perspective, beyond the two

slim booklets setting it out in general terms (1989, 1995). More extensive
works are
beginning to appear by scholars who proclaim themselves as

Afrocentrists, share in some of the uncritical fervour for the Diopian

 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 255

tradition, and partake in the insistent racialization of intellectual inquiry,

but maintain distinctions between history and myth, between anti-racism
and reverse racism. Books like Clinton N. Jean's Behind the Eurocentric Veils
(1991) and Clovis M. Semmes’s Cultural Hegemony and African American

Development (1992) are in this vein. They may proclaim themselves as

Afrocentric; they may, as

Jean does, assert that their identification of ‘black

anteriority’ is part of a school that ‘elevates blackness’ (Jean 1991: 99); they
may, like Semmes, offer a vague approval of Cress Welsing’s ideas (Semmes
1992: 23-4, 29); they but both extend the field of inquiry and escape the
dead hand of unquestioned authority extended by Asante.
It may yet be and —
it is certainly to be hoped —
that stances like Keto’s,
Jean’s and Semmes’s will become more the norm, as Afrocentric inquiry
matures and diversifies. Certainly that ts the proclaimed belief of Ivan Van
Sertima. Introducing and praising the collected essays of Charles S. Finch,
Van Sertima suggests that:

The first crude phase of the struggle to revise our history is passing. Those
earlier hollow boasts about the vague and vast achievements have given way
to something deeper, more cautious and yet more confident, more
danger-
ous, closer to the detail of historical truth and therefore more revolutionary.
Finch’s essays belong to that new revisionist body of work that is so

meticulously documented, so reasonably argued, that it does not have to

circulate within the closed circle of the converted but can

begin to shock
and change the climate of thinking in the world at large. (‘Foreword’, in
Finch 1990: 1)

Unfortunately, the nature of the very essays which those remarks preface
raises doubt about the
judgement. Finch a meclical—

doctor who has forayed

into history aud Egyptology relies —

almost entirely on the same narrow and

often idiosyneratic range of sources as most other contemporary Afrocentr-
ists, including an
entirely uncritical allegiance Diop,
to ‘the movement's
Erasmus’ (1990: 3) possessed of ‘fathomless (ibid.: 21), and
knowledge’
enthusiasm for Gerald Masscy’s odd theories (Finch 1989), There is no sign
that he has conducted any kind of research beyond a reading of such
sources. He advocates the view that white people are
products of albinoid
mutation from the original black human form (1990; 39-45; see also Van
Sertima 1985: 17-22), asserts that ‘Nile Valley civilizations exercised a

cultural hegemony over all of Western antiquity’ (1990: 59), holds Asia in

the familiar idea

but entirely speculative that the original Jews must have
been black (ibid.; 64), and the almost certainly false one that the ‘Great

Queens of Ethiopia’ ruled over a matriarchal society (93-120). He makes

very sweeping and seemingly unsubstantiated claims about Egyptian and
other ancient African medical knowledges (121-40), and buys wholesale
the conviction that Christianity was almost entirely derived from Egyptian
religion (169-94),
The most assiduous effort toward rehabilitating the old ‘vindicationist’
256 AFROCENTRISM

tradition of Afro-American polemic, and combining it with serious

historical
scholarly standards, hasa from
slightly surprising source:
come the then

already venerable (since sadly deceased) doyen of sociological research on

black America, St Clair Drake. In retirement, Drake quite purposefully

moved away from the procedures of academic convention to produce in his
two-volume Black Folk Here and There a synthesis of Afrocentric research in
which ‘the author consciously and deliberately makes whatever sacrifice of
academic “objectivity” is needed to
present this subject from a black
(Drake 1990: xi). Arguing that notions of ‘objectivity’ have in
perspective’
any case come under serious challenge from a wide range of developments
in the sociology of knowledge, Drake believes that such developments
confer validity on his stance. This is one in which:

The adoption of a black perspective in history, philosophy, or the social

sciences deliberately restricts the frame of reference within which people
and events are observed and evaluated. The focus is narrowed so as to

concentrate on the Black Experience. (1987; 1)

Drake's model is, evidently, primarily that of Du Bois’s exercises in synthes-

wing global black history and his title makes
—
allusion to one of these, the
elder statesman’s 1939 Black Folk Then and Now. He also, however, offers a

rehabilitation of the entire ‘vindicationist’ tradition, including its

partial
often mythologizing views of ancient African history. As he argues:

Crucial in the Afro-Americans’ coping process has been their identification,

over a time span of more than two centuries, with ancient Egypt and Ethiopia
as
symbols of black initiative and success, ... Great myths are always part of
group-coping strategies. (1987: xv)

Yet this does not involve Drake in

abandoning critical standards of logic,
evidence and plausibility. In his extensive and valuable bibliogr
in the vindicationist
aphical
vein
essays, he certainly offers judgements on writers
which may strike the more detached observer (one who does not or cannot

adopt ‘the perspective’ and, indeed,

black doubts whether such a
singular
entity really exists) as overly indulgent. But such writers are still evaluated
according to the weight and coherence of the evidence they put forward;
and where they are found wanting, this is stated clearly -

as with Frances
Cress and the melanin theorists, of whom Drake rightly: ‘no
Welsing says,
results of controlled experimental research design had been produced to

bolster their bold, far-reaching assertions’ (1987: 101). And Drake's own

historical narrative quite clearly indicates where its assertions are

speculat-
ive, and seeks to balance evidence drawn from the romantic Afrocentrist,
Diopian and vindicationist: schools against that from more conventional
sources in history, archacology, anthropology and sociology. Sometimes this
exercise may secm to the less sympathetic reader —
as it docs to this one —

matter of trying to give equal weight to sources which make serious use of
 THE NETWORK, SCHOOL AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 257

evidence and those which do not. However, if bridges can be built between
Afrocentric scholarship and more orthodox kinds, Drake, more than anyone
else, has shown the way to do so.

Notes

L.A formulation which presumably refers to Israel/Palestine, and would be thought

equally grotesque by ad/sides of the argument over Isracli occupation of Arad land.
2. Of these, only Diop could be said ever to have offered even the most tangential
support for such claims. He never wrote in any detail about the slave trade; but in one

passing, unsubstantiated reference in an

early work, he claimed that it ‘has been estimated
that the slave trade swallowed up one hundred to three hundred million individuals’
(1987: 142),
3. Linda James Myers solves the problem —~

according to the ‘ancient African

teachings’
she advocates, not only are you what you eat, you @re your shoes, and
everything else:
‘(the) Self then includes all ancestors, the yet unborn, the entire community, and all of
nature’ (1988: 19).
4, Other efforts to argue that Afrocentrism offers a total, liberaung transformation of
educational philosophy include Neter (1995); Dickerson (1995); C. Crawford (1996). In
an earlier Asante-edited H. Spratlen presents
volume, an Thaddeus
equally pretentious
and vacuous
argument for
Perspectives in Economics’ ‘Racial (Spratlen 1980), The
process of asserting a distinctive but contentless ‘African approach’ evidently could be —

and probably will be extended to every imaginable field of study or activity,

—

5. The procedure also involves, as critic Michael Blakey (1995: 222-4) has noted,
crude misreadings of the history of ideas. Identifying an ideology of progress as a crucial
~
and undesirable aspect of all European thought from Plato onwards,
—
Ani completely
nusunderstands the relative novelty of that ideology, which came to the fore only with the
late Renaissance or even the cighteenth-century Enlightenment. Prior to this, most
European thought, from Platonic doctrmes to Christian theologies, held to a static or
cyclical view of history.
6. The principle of Noncontradiction is, straightforwardly, that a (hing cannot be both
A and not-A at the same ume. The principle of Excluded Middle, as Wiredu implies,
involves more complex arguments, but in essence says merely that any given proposition
must be cither true or false.
7, Wiener's book
republished by Afrocentric was enthusiasts in 1992. Other writers

who had earlier

proposed the thesis that Africans voyaged to the Americas included Afro-
Americans Joel Augustus Rogers, John G, Jackson (1972), and Harold Lawrence (1962),
as well as the English esotertcists Albert Churchward and Gerald Massey.
8. His and his disciples’ writings are rather conspicuous by their absence from the
bibliographies or acknowledgements of Molefi Asante and the Temple ‘school’, as well as
those of Karenga, Carruthers and therr circle and vice versa. ~

9. Among the wilder exercises i

mythmaking by contributors to Van Sertuma’s many
edited volumes are those of Wayne Chandler, Asa Hilliard, Legrand H. Clegg and Phaon
Goldman in Egypt Revisited (1989); and Chandler, Lumpkin and Don Luke in Afncan
Presence in
Early Europe (1985), as well as some of the claims about ancient African
achievements in Blacks mm Scrence (1983).
10. See Gwyn A, Williams (1979), an enormously sumulating book with wide implica-
tions for the formation of historical myth, for the history of this remarkably durable

legend.
Li. And, indeed, Asia: yet another Van Seruma-edited collection (with Rashidi, 1988)
traces, more or less fancifully, ancient African colonizations from Sinai to Singapore,
Aden to Australia. Runoko Rashidi (1992) focuses on the supposed African origins of
Indian populations and cultures, including a claim that the Buddha was an African.
Edward Scobie (1994), largely derivative of Van Sertima, claims to trace an Afmican ‘global
258 AFROCENTRISM

in Asia, mamly the result of

For far more scholarly views of African presences
presence’.
the Arab slave trade, see Harris (1971); Ali (1996).
and works in
12. For Charles
instance, Finch devotes a laudatory essay to Massey's life
Van Sertima (1989); while John G, Jackson's book Man,
God and Civilization (1972/1983)
Other such invocations, from a long list, include J.A.
is dedicated to Massey’s memory.
Van Deburg [ed.| [1997: 67]), Van Sertima (1994a: 1); Hilliard (1994b: 385):
Rogers (in
C. Crawford (1996: 5, 102, 105, 120-21, 123).
of these ideas with a certain kind of English romantic anuquarian
13. The persistence
young James Joyce
while the was
is noted, for instance, by Patrick Wright (1995: 111-13);
1995: 47~8). Martin Bernal’s Black Athena
attracted to their Insh counterparts (Cheng
such views passing, and only m endnotes: Bernal (1991: 563-4
suggests sympathy with
1m

n.37; 611 1.189).

 19

Afrocentrism and Science

Afrocentrism has been an affair mostly of the humanities, of claims about

history, culture and mentality. Yet the movement has also achieved signifi-
cant bridgeheads in the natural sciences, and it is here that many of the
most outrageous and disturbing arguments have been advanced.
A major source of the most extreme claims is Ivan Van Sertima’s collection
Blacksin Science, Ancient and Modern (1983), peculiar mixed
a
bag of piously
exaggerated assertions about the importance of various modern black
scientists, and absurd affirmations about ancient African science. Among
the artifacts illustrated in support of the latter is a small wooden effigy of
the Egyptian god Horus, who took the form of a falcon. Khalil Messiha
claims that this is glider, showing the Pharaohs’
a model command of the

principles of acronautics and their ability to fly (Messiha 1983: the pictures
and the claims are reproduced also in Browder [1992: 132-3])! Ancient
Egyptians also invented the wet-cell battery, and pioneered most aspects of
geometry (Lumpkin 1983a).! The Dogon discovered that Sirius had a small

companion star centuries before Western astronomers did so, indicating

either invention of refracting telescopes, or mystic powers (H. Adams 1983a,
b). Tanzanians were
using semiconductors in the fifth century (Shore
1983). And so on. Yet the book has been endorsed uncritically and at length
by noted feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding (1991: 223-7).?
As Robert Hughes comments: “To plough through the literature of Afro-
centrism is to enter a world of claims about technological innovation so

absurd that they lic beyond satire, like those made for Russian science in
Stalin’s time’ (Hughes 1993: 136).
Indeed, the connections between Stalinist pseudo-science and the Afro-
centric variety are in at least one case
quite direct. In Afrcan Systems of

Science, Technology and Art: The Nigerian Experience (Thomas-Emeagwala

1993), F.P.A.Oyedipe on the ‘technique’ of Kirlian
draws photography,
which was by the Russian Semyon Kirlian in 1939 and is claimed
‘invented’
to
capture
invisible energies radiating from material objects. Oyedipe thinks
this is relevant to ‘the metaphysical aspects of Yoruba traditional medicine’,
because the Yoruba traditional healer ‘indeed knows much about the
unseen aspects of life which Kirlian photography has pointed out’ (ibid.:

259
260 AFROCENTRISM

59). He thinks it is ‘pertinent to ask questions about the scientific validity of

data collected and collated from this invisible metaphysical realm’ (ibid.:
61). As this implies, Oyedipe, like Asante and many other Afrocentrists, has
assimilated clements of New Age thought to his cultural nationalist concerns

—
his sole source for Kirlian photography is
apparently The Encyclopaedia of
Alternative Medicme and Self-Help, though it is noteworthy that Cheikh Anta

Diop had drawn attention to Kirlian’s ideas rather earlier (Diop 1991: 367).
Oyedipe -

in a book whose other contributors, it should be pointed out,

mostly offer modest, sensible and scholarly accounts of early Nigerian
techniques of dyeing, metalworking, food processing, and so on —

also
indicates another tendency in efforts to assert the scientific achievements of
low-tech cultures: to claim so wide a variety of activities as ‘science’ that the
term is emptied of meaning. For Oyedipe, Yoruba healers were
practising
‘science’ when they -

well —

looked at things: ‘Science at the pre-literate

icvel of social organisation ... can be understood to mean that natural

phenomena was (sic) observed as much possible. The five senses

as saw,

tasted, touched, smelled and heard’ (Thomas-Emeagwala 1993: 56).

Oyedipe and most —
of Van Sertima’s contributors at least write ~—

coherently. When Yosef Ben-Jochannen addressed a 1987 London confer-

ence, supposedly talking about ‘The African Contribution to Technology

and Science’, his discourse as later published defied all notions of rational-

ity. Essentially repeating the standard stories of how the Greeks and the Jews
stole all their ideas from Egypt, Ben-Jochannen said virtually nothing
whatever specifically about Egyptian, or other African, science or technolo-
gies. He did, however, offer thoughts on race pride in general, urge his
listeners always to carry mirrors with them to look at how beautiful they
were, and claim that Queen Elizabeth IL is descended from ‘an Ethiopian
woman
by the name of Martha’ and therefore ‘belongs to the family’
(Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 64-5), that Africans invented the calendar
12,000 years ago, and numerous other jeux desprit.
Claims for prior or superior African scientific rationality alternate in
Afrocentric rhetoric with celebrations of supposed irrationality: an anti-
science ideology which harks back to Aimé Césaire’s version of Négritude
(‘Heiah for those who never invented anything!’, in the words of his famous

long poem Cahiers d’un retour at pays natal) and looks forward to New Age
anti-rationalism, Dorthy L. Pennington, for instance, applauds the superior-
ity of an
allegedly non-linear African concept of ime:

The mathematical division of time observed by Westerners has little relevance

to Africans ... one year may have 350 days, while another may have 390 days,
since the actual number is of secondary importance. ... Time, as
continuity,
was directed from the perspective of the past, rather than toward a future

goal. (1985: 131-7)

Now, it may well be that conceptions of time are radically culture-specific,

and that there are
quite distinctive African traditions on the subject the —
 AFROCENTRISM AND SCIENCE 261

work Johannes Fabian

of (1983), John S. Mbiti (1969) and D.A. Masolo
(1994: 108-19) offers important theoretical reflections on this point.
Pennington, however, is claiming that Africans and those of African descent
are
inherently inept at tasks requiring accurate measurement, efficiency,
goal-directed future planning. Their minds simply don’t work that way. No
colonialist vapourings about ‘the African Mind’ could possibly be more
disparaging than her supposedly affirmative account.

Extensive, and maybe excessive, publicity has been given to the science
section of the Portland African-American Baseline Essays, introduced in
1987 for junior-school teachers in Portland, Oregon; subsequently adopted
in several other citics, debated in more, and to amused or

media attention. The

many
science “Baseline
subjected
is the
outraged Essay’ by same

Hunter Havelin Adams II who contributed some of the most ridiculous

claims to the Van Sertima collection on African science (1983). He

supposedly believes, on the basis of the Horus-falcon ‘glider’ mentioned

above, that the ancient had made extensive of full-size gliders.
Egyptians use

Ancient Egyptians, in his view, also had a wide range of psychic powers and
‘a possible understanding of quantum physics and gravitational theory
(Gross and Levitt 1994: 208).
Adams was described as a research scientist, ‘advancing the state of the
art of proton beam detection and diagnostic equipment’ at the Argonne
National Laboratory's Atomic Accelerator. [t was later revealed that in fact
he was an industrial Argonne,
hygiene technician there, at did no research
and had no formal education
high-school diploma (Gross and
beyond a

Levitt 1994: 209). The tendency to claim or imply grand-sounding academic

careers and affiliations seems to be quite widespread among Afrocentrists.
One notes Maulana Karenga's former Directorship of the Institute of Pan-
African Studies, Los Angeles; that Cress Welsing is Clinical Director, Paul
Robeson School for Growth and Development; Clyde Ahmad Winters is
founder and head of the Uthman Dan Fodio Institute; Abena Walker, chief
consultant (at a reported fee of $250,000) to Washington DC’s Afrocentric
school programme, directed and awarded herself degrees from her own
Pan-African University. Most sonorously of all, Yosef Ben-Jochannen was

‘Senior Professor of Egyptology, First World Alliance School of African

Thought, Harlem’ (Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 315). One wonders how
many of these institutions exist other than as letterheads.
On
the one hand, this inflation of titles testifies to the long exclusion of

many highly able African-Americans from more conventionally prestigious

appointments and genuine institutions of higher learning. On the other, it

partakes of the equally long tradition of charlatanry in American public life,

with its endless litany of fake degrees (some available for export, as with
‘Dr’ Jan Paisley), fake religious ordinations and, among blacks, fake African
princes and sages. Perhaps the most splendid piece of such chuizpah in the
history of American Africanism was the ethnic entrepreneur who, during
the 1930s Abyssinian crisis, reportedly sought to raise money by claiming to
be an emissary from Abyssinia, while going under the name Wyxzewixard
262 AFROCENTRISM

SJ. Challaoucliziczese (Essicen-Udom 1964: 319). It would be tempting, were

it not so callous, to say that anyone who believed in a name like that deserved
to have their money stolen.”
The other major tendency in Afrocentric claims about science is an older,
less absurd but in its extremes sadder phenomenon than the attribution of
and every discovery to ancient Egyptians or Yoruba: the sometimes
any
desperate scarch for black contributions to modern science and technology:
‘contributory history’ at its most extreme. The Van Sertima volume includes
several instances of this kind, notably essays by John Henrik Clarke and by
Van Sertima himself.
The pioneering figure most often fastened upon is George Washington
Carver, a
plant biologist who researched at Booker T. Washington's
accommodationist Tuskegee Institute. Not only is Carver's actual signifi-
cance as a scientist routinely overstated, but as the prominent African- —

American historian of science Kenneth R. Manning notes the focus on —

him has some

highly dubious facets:

Carver ...
espoused the traits of humility, diligence and manual dexterity
that whites appreciated in blacks.... Carver’s work was inventive, rather
than scientifically creative: product-oriented, rather than pressing to new

theoretical heights; and carried out in the black community with few if any
intrusions into the white. Carver, white scientists might have opined, ‘knew
his place’ and accepted it. (K. Manning 1993: 328)

In other words, Carver was a

perfect analogue to the political role of his
boss, Washington. Men such as William Augustus Hinton, Elmer Imes or

Ernest Everett Just. whose creative and theoretical achievements were

greater, are relatively neglected they just —

don’t fit the populist proclivitics
of Afro-American cultural nationalism.
John Henrik Clarke’s enumeration of ‘the African-American inventors
that we have with good records’ includes such utterly marginal figures as

Benjamin Banneker, who ‘literally, made the first clock in the United States’
(Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 73-4) —

the implication being, presumably,

either that no one had ever built a clock on American soil during the
colonial period, or that Banneker woke up one day and said ‘Hey! They're
the Declaration of in hour If
signing Independence an or two.
1 get working
on those flywheels right now I'll be in the history books!’ Clarke also
includes one
James Fontaine, who supposedly had the idea of making
soldiers’ trousers out of tent-cloth so that they would last longer (ibid.: 74).
Quite why these
qualified feats Banneker or Fontaine as ‘inventors’ or

‘scientists’ impossible to tell. Proclaiming

is them as such merely devalues
the achievements of genuine Afro-American scientists ~
of the handful of
black American men and women who, before the very recent past, sur-

mounted all obstacles to achieve significant, often unrecognized, scientific

or technical innovations, Banneker, descended from both African slaves
and English indentured servants, was in fact a remarkable figure whose
 AFROCENTRISM AND SCIENCE 263

genuine achievements against vast odds are only diminished by his being
appropriated to mythographies like Clarke's. He was a town
surveyor (one
of the original planners of Washington, DC), publicist, fighter for racial
self-taught mathematician and astronomer. He was
justice, and talented not,
however, a scientist in any conventionally understood sense of the word.
Such fanciful appropriations are, if anything, even more
insulting to the
work of the many men and women of African descent who, now that some of
the old barriers have come down, are
working and making major contribu-
tions in all scientific fields worldwide. This kind of ethnic-absolutist puffing
would have been ~

and for the living often evidently is —

thoroughly
distasteful African-American scientists themselves. As
to most practising
Manning says:

devoted themselves this model of

The degree to which black scientists to

considerations of race culture,

‘pure’ science, untrammeled by extraneous or

is quite remarkable. Not always with complete success, they insisted on being
called ‘scientists’, scientists’. The racial qualifier to them
wever
‘Negro was an

insidious, obfuscating element. (Manning 1993: 328: original emphasis)

Although he notes that the neutrality of the profession was, in American

circumstances, often breached in practice, and that black scientists were

discriminated against in numerous subtle ways, Manning broadly shares his

subjects’ views:

[T]he notion of a
Negro writer, dancer, musician, poet, lawyer, or historian
carries with it certain connotations or assumptions about the individual’s
work. Some of
assumptions may these others not. A cultural be legitimate,
basis, perhaps perspective
an may sometimes
ethnic be discerned within the
work of someone working in any of these fields, But, in the abstract, there
can be no such entity as Negro science no
Negro physics, chemistry, or —

biology, no
pecwiarly Negro way of gathering and analyzing scientific data
or of solving problems. (ibid.: 332-3)

It is this cultural neutrality, and even the aspiration to it, which Afrocentric
theories seek to dissipate. In the past, and on the whole, the claims of
African-American cultural nationalists have made no inroads into the actual
substance, the subject matter, of scientific research ~

their procedures and

interests, not to mention their lack of relevant expertise, made it impossible
for them to do so. They could only laud, or
exaggerate, the achievements
and influence of individual black researchers without saying anything
let alone prescriptive, about their work. As Gross and Levitt
significant, say,
when one reads the nascent literature of Afrocentric science, one is struck

by the great quantity of Afrocentrism, and equally by the remarkable paucity

of science (1994: 205). An attempt is now being made to change that, in so
far as the claims by Asante and others about ‘soul as method’, ‘affective

epistemologies’, and Afrocentrism as holistic approach to knowledge are

264 AFROCGENTRISM

evidently intended to apply to the natural sciences as well as social studies

and humanities. Few, if any, practising scientists, however, are
likely to take
such claims seriously, and that is all to the good.

Notes

1. The author of this set of claims, Beatrice Lumpkin, fortified them in a simultancously
published novel, Senefar and Hatshepsut, which she called a tale of ‘Egyptian genius’
(Lumpkin 1983b). No very clear boundaries seemed to be observed between the historical
article and the avowedly fictional effusion. See also Lumpkin (1994); and the related
claims m Amen (1993).
2. Harding does not
appear to have unqualified endorsement
substantiated her of Van
Sertima’s book by looking at any other ancient
wnting Egyptian and African
on

technologies or knowledges. She seems, moreover, to accept equally uncritically Afrocen-

tric claims about the Pharaomc Eyyptuan population, referring to ‘the period when Egypt
was
occupied by “Africans” (before the cleventh-century spread of Islamic culture)’ (1991:
223-4), and to Walter Rodney's arguments about colonially induced African degeneration
(ibid; 227-31). Her further forays into the field (Harding 1994, 1997), though they
provide very extensive lists of sources on the ‘sociology of science’ and ‘science and
colonialism’, continue to show a
surprising lack of curiosity about the actual substance of
the ‘non-Western knowledges’ towards whose value she gestures.
3, For further examples, see Gerald Early’s pioneering lite study of Afro-American
magicians, most of whom seem to have claimed African, and usually royal, birth (Early
1994).
 20

Psychology, Race and Magic Melanin

Many of Afrocentrism’s major themes, especially claims about distinctive

psychological and emotional characteristics, derive —

as we have seen —

from
1960s and 1970s cultural nationalism. The ‘New Black Psychology’ of that
era, by figures like Alvin
led Poussaint, Charles W. Thomas and Wade
Nobles, was heavily influenced by Fanon, and emphasized a need to create

positive black self-images and self-esteem. Pride in one’s

appearance
and
z in
black cultural creativity in America was
heavily stressed; pride in African

history, at this stage, less so. The latter could, however, be seen as a natural
corollary of the demand for more
positive collective selfperceptions.
Together with this appeared the view propounded by some, but not all,
1960s black radical psychologists that there existed a distinctive ‘black
personality’. It was an idea which was, of course, taken over direct from

Senghor’s négritude, and not really compatible with Fanon’s stance: in some
Afro-American thought, none the less, the two were combined. All these
streams of thinking flowed into later Afrocentric ideas on
psychology,
which, however, have taken them very much further in the directions of
unanimism, essentialism and assertions of inherent black psychic superiority
than the earlicr theories did -—

though Wade Nobles, who was already

pontificating in the 1970s about the need to revive an ‘African philosophical
orientation’ fight ‘scientific
to colonialism’ (quoted in Van Deburg 1992:
59), and progressed in the 1980s to expounding the crucial
had relevance
of ancient Egyptian thought to modern black psychology (Nobles 1986a, b),
forms a
point of contact and continuity.'
A quite contrary current of thinking about African-American psychology
has also retained some currency in nationalist circles —

one which, far from

proclaiming black
superiority in mental thatand emotional health, asserts

these are marked

by extreme, congenital weaknesses. The intention of such

seemingly scl/defaming arguments appears to be twofold: to underline, in

the sharpest possible way, the damage done by slavery and its legacies; and
to argue that such defects can be overcome only by embracing the particular
political or religious solutions that the writer advocates. This strategy
appears widespread in ‘born again’ religious circles of all kinds, certainly
not only Christian ones: one of its most extreme exponents is the Black
266 AFROCENTRISM

Muslim publicist Na’im Akbar. Adopting widespread trope of comparing

the
the Nazi Shoah (a device which of course,
has, provoked recurrent
slavery to

hostility and misunderstanding between black and Jewish groups), he argues

that the enslavement of Africans was the most traumatizing experience in
human history: ‘including the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz which were

flecting and direct, destroying bodies, but essentially leaving the collective
mind intact’, And the abolition of chattel slavery was succeeded by a form
of mental slavery still worse in its effects (Akbar 1984: 1). Describing its
Akbar quite remarkable list of alleged psychic
legacies, proceeds to a

disabilities laziness (ibid.: 9-12), obsession

Afro-Americans: with
among
status and
showy consumption (12-15), disrespect for leadership (16-19),
clownish behaviour (20-22), inferiority complexes (23-6), divided com-

munities (26-30), weak families (30-35) and internally divisive colour

complexes (35-40). The charge-sheet is remarkably similar to that drawn
American racism. Akbar
up against blacks by the classic expressions of white
is also the author of some of the wildest Afrocentric claims about the
wisdom of ancient Egypt, proclaiming, for instance, that it was ‘both

technologically and spiritually’ far in advance of twentieth-century societies

(Akbar 1994: 341).
The rise of the ‘melanin scholars’ can no doubt be attributed partly to

reaction against such rhetorics. In the 1980s and 1990s a current thesis

attributing extraordinary powers to melanin —

the chemical which pigments

skin gained ground.?
—
The notion of melanin as crucial to social destiny is
not new.
Jean Price-Mars, while expressing due scepticism about the concept
of human ‘races’ (1959: 57-9), none the less concluded an address to a

Présence Africaine conference with a

peroration which linked environmental
determinism with the notion of Africans as
distinguished and privileged by
the melanin in their skins:

To what, then, did Africa owe the enjoyment of such a great privilege millions
of years if not to the mildness of her sunny climate at a time when the
ago
of other continents rendered them inadequate, if not impossible,
glaciation
as abodes? There is in Africa's past an inclination towards hospitality and
creation which the Melano-Africans claim as their heritage...
For the Melanic type ... which other men have called the scum of

humanity, this type has awakened from a

long sleep of expectation to
demand its rightful place among its brothers by blood and by destiny. (ibid.:
65)

Present-day ‘melanin scholars’ proclaim significance for that humble sub-

stance far beyond anything Price-Mars’s rational sensibility could have
Dubois Phillip McGee, in of the earlier expressions of the
imagined. one

melanist view, asserts: ‘we are convinced that the absence of melanin is

directly linked with the malfunctioning of the central nervous system’ (1976:
220), but admits that the supposed relationship is ‘poorly understood’.
Later protagonists have dropped that residue of caution. Frances Cress
 PSYCHOLOGY, RACE AND MAGIC MELANIN 267

Welsing, probably the most influential, thinks that melanin ‘perhaps the is
most fantastic stuff on the planet. It allows for the special spiritual qualities
and emotional refinements black people have ... melanin is the neuro-

chemical basis of what we call “soul” .. . sort of like a

hydrogen bomb at the

genetic level’ (Person-Lynn 1996: 81-2). According to one of their sharpest

critics, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano:

They claim that melanin is a

superconductor, that it absorbs all frequencies
of the electromagnetic spectrum, that it can convert sound energy to light

energy reversibly, and that it can function as a

minicomputer to process
information people with high
... melanin levels have better muscular co-

ordination (which makes them better athletes), are mentally superior, have
unusual faculties, such as ESP, and are influenced by the magnetic fields of
other humans and of the earth. (Montellano 1992: 163)

According to Amos Wilson: ‘Black superiority in the areas of mental

development, neurological functioning, and psychomotor development ...

(are) all related to the possession of a high level of melanin’ (quoted in

Schlesinger 1991: 64). In Cress Welsing's version, white people's fear of the
melanin-rich (quite a rational fear, given the latter’s innate superiority) led
Europeans to persecuic Africans throughout history, culminating in the

present, deliberately created ‘AIDS Holocaust’ (Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988:

289-99; Gress Welsing 1991: 291-301).
As Montellano notes (1992), many of the more extreme ‘melanin
scholarship’ claims are difficult to document in the usual way, for they are
rarely committed to
print but, rather, circulate in public lecture form and
as broadcast talks on
independent black radio stations. Much of his evidence
comes from the latter source. Such information is also now broadcast on

the Internet, where the ‘Melanin Library’, run by psychologist Richard King
and operated of ‘United Brothers and United Sisters
cations
as part
Inc.’, advertises itself ‘Melanin research
Communi-
center’,
Systems, as a a

‘repository of books, research articles, theses, audio and video tapes and
other information’ and a
‘Speakers Bureau for Guest and Keynote Speakers
about information related to Melanin’?
However, some of their material does appear on the bookstalls (apart
from the writers discussed here, see Barnes [1988]; Finch [1990]; Moore
[1992a}). Richard King has developed the most elaborate published theory
on these lines, a theory which combines pseudo-science with mysticism,
starting from the latter. The substance involved in all life
primary black. Blackness, the
processes,
origin of
King,is carbon which of course,
—

is, as
says
life, is thus divine, as ancient African civilizations recognized:

These original titans found that all life came from a black seed, all life was

rooted in blackness, all things possessed a memory of their collective

ancestors. Blackness, the universal solvent of all was scen as the onc reality
from which the threads of the loom of life black was the color of
spun ...
266 AFROCGENTRISM

Muslim publicist Na‘im Akbar. Adopting the widespread trope of comparing

slavery to the Nazi Shoah (a device which has, of course, provoked recurrent

hostility and misunderstanding between black and Jewish groups), he argues

that the enslavement of Africans was the most traumatizing experience in
human history: ‘including the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz which were

fleeting and direct, destroying bodies, but essentially leaving the collective
mind intact’. And the abolition of chattel slavery was succeeded by a form
of mental slavery still worse in its effects (Akbar 1984: 1). Describing its

legacies, Akbar proceeds to a

quite remarkable list of alleged psychic
disabilities among laziness (ibid; 9-12),
Afro-Americans: obsession with
status and
showy consumption (12-15), disrespect for leadership (16-19),
clownish behaviour (20-22), inferiority complexes (23-6), divided com-

munities (26-30), weak families ($0-35) and internally divisive colour

complexes (35-40). The charge-sheet is remarkably similar to that drawn

up against blacks by the classic expressions of white American racism. Akbar
is also the author of some of the wildest Afrocentric claims about the
wisdom of ancient Egypt, proclaiming, for instance, that it was ‘both

technologically and spiritually’ far in advance of twentieth-century societies

(Akbar 1994: 341).
The rise of the ‘melanin scholars’ can no doubt be attributed partly to

reaction against such rhetorics. In the 1980s and 1990s a current thesis
attributing extraordinary powers to melanin the chemical —

which pigments
skin gained ground.? The notion
—
of melanin as crucial to social destiny is
about the
not
new.Jean Price-Mars, while expressing due scepticism concept
of human ‘races’ (1959: 57-9), none the less concluded an address to a

Présence Africae conference with peroration which linked environmental

a

determinism with the notion of Africans as

distinguished and privileged by
the melanin in their skins:

To what, then, did Africa owe the enjoyment of such a

great privilege millions
of years ago if not to the mildness of her sunny climate at a time when the
rendered them if not
glaciation of other conunents inadequate, impossible,
as abodes? There is in Africa’s past an inclination towards hospitality and
creation which the Melano-Africans claim their
as heritage. ..

.
For the Melanic type ... which other men have called the scum of

humanity, this type has awakened from a

long sleep of expectation to

demand its rightful place among its brothers by blood and by destiny. (ibid.:
65)

Present-day ‘melanin scholars’ proclaim significance for that humble sub-

stance far beyond anything Price-Mars’s rational sensibility could have

imagined. Dubois Phillip McGee, in one of the earlier expressions of the

melanist view, asserts: ‘we are convinced that the absence of melanin is

directly linked with the malfunctioning of the central nervous

system’ (1976:
220), but admits that the supposed relationship is ‘poorly understood’.
Later protagonists have dropped that residue of caution, Frances Cress
 PSYGHOLOGY, RACE AND MAGIC MELANIN 267

Welsing, probably the most influential, thinks that melanin is ‘perhaps the
most fantastic stuff on the planet. It allows for the special spiritual qualities
and emotional refinements black people have ... melanin is the neuro-

chemical basis of what we call “soul” ... sort of like a

hydrogen bomb at the

genetic level’ (Person-Lynn 1996: 81-2). According to one of their sharpest

critics, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano:

They that melanin

claim is a superconductor, that it absorbs all frequencies
of the electromagnetic spectrum, that it can convert sound cnergy to light

energy reversibly, and that it can function as a

minicomputer to process
information people with high melanin
... levels have better muscular co-

ordination (which makes them better athletes), are mentally superior, have
unusual faculties, such as ESP, and are mfluenced by the magnetic fields of
other humans and of the earth. (Montellano 1992: 163)

According to Amos Wilson: ‘Black superiority in the arcas of mental

development, neurological functioning, and psychomotor development ...

(are) all related to the possession of a high level of melanin’ (quoted in

Schlesinger 1991: 64). In Cress Welsing’s version, white people's fear of the
melanin-rich (quite a rational fear, given the latter's innate superiority) led
Europeans to persecute Africans throughout history, culminating in the
present, deliberately created ‘AIDS Holocaust’ (Addai-Scbo and Wong 1988:
289-99; Cress Welsing 1991: 291-301).
As Montellano notes (1992), many of the more extreme ‘melanin

scholarship’ claims are difficult to document in the usual way, for they are
rarely committed to print but, rather, circulate in public lecture form and
as broadcast talks on
independent black radio stations. Much of his evidence
comes from the latter source. Such information is also now broadcast on

the Internet, where the ‘Mclanin Library’, run

by psychologist Richard King
and operated as part of ‘United Brothers and United Sisters Communi-
cations Systems, Inc.’, advertises itself as a ‘Melanin research center’, a

‘repository of books, research articles, theses, audio and video tapes and
other information’ and a ‘Speakers Bureau for Guest and Keynote Speakers
about information related to Melanin’.*
However, some of their material does appear on the bookstalls (apart
from the writers discussed here, see Barnes [1988]; Finch [1990]; Moore
[1992a]). Richard King has developed the most elaborate published theory
on these lines, a theory which combines pseudo-scicnce with mysticism,
starting from the latter. The primary substance involved in all life processes,
says King, is carbon —
which is, of course, black. Blackness, as the origin of

life, is thus divine, as ancient African civilizations recognized:

These original titans found that all life came from a black seed, all life was

rooted in blackness, all things possessed a memory of their collective

ancestors. Blackness, the universal solvent of all was seen as the one reality
from which spun the threads of the loom of life ... black was the color of
268 AFROCENTRISM

carbon, the key atom found in ail living matter of our world; carbon atoms

linked to form black melanin, the first chemical that could capture light and

reproduce itself, the chemical key to life; and the brain itself was found to be
centered around black ncuromelanin. Inner vision, intuition, creative genius,
and spiritual illumination were all found to be dependent upon pineal gland
bleod borne chemical messengers that controlled skin color and opened the
hidden door to the darkness of the collective unconscious mind ... to

universal knowledge of the past, present, and future. (King 1990: 13-14)*

So —

literally holy perfection of blackness,

given this which the Ancients well
understood, how
did pale people come into existence? As some Africans

migrated north, they found that in colder climates with less sunlight high-
melanin skin prevented the photosynthesis of Vitamin D, which humans
need for calcium (ibid.: 57-9). Natural selection thus favoured the
occasional lighter-skinned mutants or albinos, who came to prevail in

European populations. But they and their descendants, naturally, paid a

high price for thus surviving in the icy, sunless north. With less melanin,
their pineal glands functioned less
actively, which in turn meant that their
mental, emotional and spiritual powers atrophied (ibid.: 60-64: one may
note again the close congruence with latter-day Euro-racist ideas, as
expressed by John Baker or Philippe Rushton). With only the left sides of
their brains working, they emphasized rationalist and materialist valucs to

compensate for their loss of intuition, creativity and spirituality. They also
became aggressive and competitive. And they could not bear to be reminded
of what they had lost, so they came to hate and fear black people. King
therefore thinks that whites react to blackness with a sense of trauma,
because the sight of black people reminds them of the loss of their culture
and spiritual consciousness: they stigmatize as cvil thosc whose superiority
they unconsciously know and resent (ibid.: 63-4).
King’s theory not only explains white aggression, lack of spirituality,
racism, and so on, not only indicates why whites are inferior people, but
suggests that they are not proper people at all: they are an aberrant, mutant

breed, Untermenschen in the fullest sense. Such premisses are, of course,

ridiculous fantasies which bear no relation to the state of geneticists’

knowledge about melanin (for admirable summaries, see Montellano
[1993]; Wills [1994]). Skin-colour differences are governed not by different
amounts of particular alleles, but by tiny genetic variations in the way the
relevant genes are regulated. The brain is not ‘centred round’ neurome-

lanin, which is one of thousands of compounds in the human brain, and

scientists still have little idea what its purpose is. They have found suggestive
but inconclusive associations between levels of melanin in the brain and
such apparently disconnected traits as greater resistance to jetlag and
susceptibility to Parkinson's Disease (Steve Jones 1996: 193, 197). So it is
not mmpossiblethat it has all the mystic powers King and others claim it is —

just an extremely unlikely piece of ideologically charged speculation.

Moreover, there is little —

if any —

correlation between levels of skin melanin

 PSYCHOLOGY, RACE AND MAGIC MELANIN 269

and levels of neuromelanin, so that whatever further mysterious properties

the latter may turn out to have, they will have nothing much to do with
concepts of race. Individual melanin granules, by the way, are not even
black, but mainly a
deep golden-yellow!
The same by Joseph Baldwin
conclusions are (or, as he has
reached
renamed himself, KobiKalongi Kambon) as by King and Cress
Kazembe

Welsing. whom
Baldwin/Kambon we have already encountered
—

praising
Idi Amin and directing self-confirming ‘research’ on Afrocentric values and
male-female relationships apparently believes that the intrinsic
—

abnormal-

ity of the melanin-deficient, their awareness of being ‘outside of nature’,

accounts for their behaviour across time. To be white is to be
pathological
in “The sense
unnatural, to exist
antagonistic
an
relationship with nature. of

being “other”, “not natural”, “apart from”, of beingborn as “disordered”

caused overwhelming fear, anxiety, and insecurity’ (Ani 1994: 472, citing
Kambon’s presentation at the First National Conference on Global White

Supremacy, Chicago, October 1990).

The magic powers of melanin are also said to account for ancient

Egyptian, other African and subsequent black scientific genius. According

to Cress Welsing (in papers which, perhaps significantly, she chose not to
publish or to republish in her collection The [sis Papers), the Dogon people
of Mali had been enabled by their mystic melanin to know a
huge range of
astronomical facts otherwise inaccessible to people without advanced
infrared telescopes and other late-twentieth-century technology. They knew
that the earth and other plancts revolve round the sun, that they do so in
elliptical rather than circular orbits, that Jupiter has four satellites, that
Sirius has a small faint companion star, and so on. How could they thus leap
ahead of all other ‘primitive peoples’ and of modern science in their

knowledge of the heavens? Because the melanin in their pineal glands

enabled them to sense it all, says Cress Welsing. She also claims that this
companion star, Sirtus B, acts as a storehouse of energy and information
transmitted from earth: people with high melanin levels can tap into all that
information, which helps to account for their superiority over whites
(Montellano 1992: 165-6). The same assertions are advanced by Hunter
Havelin Adams, author of the much-derided Portland Science Baseline

Essay -

and the claims about the Dogon’s astronomical achievements,

though not about their supposed melanic source, are endorsed without
demur in a recent major multiculturalist textbook (Shohat and Stam 1994:
58).
In fact none of these ideas about the Dogon’s advanced astronomical

knowledge original. is The French ethnographer Marcel Griaule had

presented them all, drawn from his interviews with the blind Dogon sage
Ogotemmeli, in the 1940s (Griaule 1965; Griaule and Dieterlen 1965; sce

the critical discussions in Masolo 1994: 68-83, Mudimbe 1988: 141-3).

Montellano suggests that Cress Welsing and Adams may not have picked
them directly from Griaule,
up but from R.G. Temple’s book The Sirius

Mystery (1976), which argued that visitors from other planets gave the
270 AFROCENTRISM

Dogon their knowledge; while ~

as with so much else in the Afrocentric
Cheikh Anta Diop had given airing to these ideas (without
pantheon an
—

their more mystical elements) too (1991: 313-23). The beliefs taken over

from Griaule did indeed seem to suggest the presence of startlingly

advanced ideas about astronomy among a low-tech and non-literate African

people
~

unless, as has been suggested, the Dogon incorporated European

astronomical knowledge, gleaned from travellers, into their mythology
sometime during the later nineteenth century (see Mudimbe 1988: 13-15
for arguments for and against this hypothesis), or unless there was a

deliberate hoax by Griaule’s informant. Personally, I find the last idea

rather attractive: the notion of highly intelligent man,
an elderly, who is

being quizzed (and no doubt to) by a colonial

condescended researcher
about his ancestral ‘primitive’ knowledge, deciding to fox him by throwing
in ideas he has gained from his reading or hearing about modern science.
All that Cress Welsing and the other melanin scholars have added to

Griaule is the ‘explanation’ that melanin in the pineal gland enabled the

Dogon to know all this. Actually, when one thinks about it, such an

explanation is not particularly flattering to the Dogon. It suggests that if the

Dogon did indeed make better sense of the stars than did Europeans before

Copernicus and Galileo, or even before our

century, this was not because
some of them were notably intelligent, observant people. It was
just their
glands working: they couldu’t help it. (And why the Dogon, rather than all
or any other Africans? They show no evident sign of having more melanin
than their neighbours; while in many scholars’ eyes the very existence of a
distinct Dogon ‘tribe’ is largely product
a of colonial categorizations.)
cress Welsing also asserts (hat George Washington Carver, the pionecring
African-American biochemist, knew what plants to experiment on because
they ‘talked to his melanin and told him what they were good for’ as he
strolled in the woods near Tuskegee (quoted Montellano in 1992: 165). As
Montellano caustically comments, teaching such ideas to African-American
schoolchildren could be deeply damaging: it would implant a belicf that
they do not need to study, but can ‘Let my melanin pick up the vibes’ (ibid.:
165).
Leonard Jeffries, also associated with the melanin theorists, achieved

notoriety by drawing in his lectures and broadcasts on the theory that whites
are ‘IcePeople’ and blacks
People’, ‘Sun personalities their collective
determined by evolutionary pressures in the distant past. This basic notion
has a long history, and has been put to relatively rational uses as we have —

seen, for instance, in the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop. Marcus Garvey, too,
had clearly picked up this idea from somewhere in the 1920s (Hill and Bair
1987: 269). The particular and far more extreme theory to which Jeffries
was
alluding, however, had been expounded first in a book called The
Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism and
Aggression (Bradley 1978/1991).
The Iceman Inheritance was written by a white Canadian author —
albeit US-
born, and boasting of a distant trace of Cherokee ancestry
—

one Michael
 PSYCHOLOGY, RACE AND MAGIC MELANIN 271

Bradley. Bradley has been a prolific purveyor of arcane historical theories

drawing on a wide range of occult and mystical ideas. In The Columbus

Conspiracy, for instance, he suggests that the real reason for Columbus's
voyage to the Americas was to establish a
refuge for a secret pan-religious
cult associated with the Cathars, with the Holy Grail myth, with direct
biological descendants of Jesus Christ, the Knights Templar, and latterly
with unexpected initiates
such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian
politician Douglas (Bradley 1992a). Although Bradicy does not identify
T.C.
this cult as Masonic, its similarity to the ideas developed by some Masonic
writers about their socicty as a
repository of ancient wisdom transcending
religious divisions and carrying a mission to establish worldwide peace and
harmony will be evident. These icleas, like Bradley's, have had considerable

appeal to many present-day Afrocentrists, and in The Columbus Conspiracy

Bradley also endorsed claims about pre-Columbian African voyages to

America.
It is Michael Bradley's theories of prehistory, however, which have had
the greatest appeal to Afrocentric publicists. In The Iceman Inheritance
Bradley argued as follows:
Modern Europeans are descended from Neanderthal man, whereas other
human races’ ancestors are of quite different stocks.” They have inherited

psychological and behaviour first developed to cope with the

patterns which
extreme cold Neanderthals during the Ice Ages. The harsh
encountered
environment made them unusually aggressive, sclfish and territorial. Physi-
cally, they became heavy, hairy, short-limbed and ‘grotesque’ in appearance
(Bradley 1978/1991: 90). Incidentally, part of Bradley's evidence for this
comes from supposed twentieth-century sightings of surviving Neanderthals
in the Caucasus (ibid.: 99-102): a view also advanced by another highly
eccentric present-day writer, Myra Shackley (1983). They also developed
extreme sexual dimorphism that is, males —
and females looked more

different from one another than they did in other races. Therefore: ‘each
tended to regard the other as something of a distinct species. I think that
there may have been grave difficulties in each sex
recognizing the other to
be completely human’ (Bradicy 1978/1991: 122). This explains why the two
sexes among ‘Caucasians’: really got used to each
‘have never other, never

really completely (ibid.: 123), This

trusted cach other’ also

heightened the general xenophobia of the European character.®

incompatibility
Neanderthals additionally, according to Bradley, developed an
aggressive,
territorial conception of time, involving a desperate urge to outdo the
achievements of the past and a fear that the future -
and thus their own

offspring might —
outdo them. This made them innovative, but ambivalent
about procreation. (Compare Cress Welsing’s belief that whites dislike their
children because the latter show to them, and perpetuate, their own

melanin-deficient and therefore inferior state.) Since whites thus fear both
the opposite sex and children —
not to mention the fact that the males have
shrunken genitals and the femaics, so Bradlicy implies, oversized vaginas
(108-10) —

they are characteristically undersexed. Sexual energy is displaced

272 AFROCENTRISM

on to violent aggression against others. The only hope that they could
become decent members of the human family lies in their turning more of
their energies to sex and sensuality.
be said that almost element of Bradley's
Perhaps it hardly needs to every
account is fantastic. Although, as we have seen, some scientists continue to

believe that modern humanity developed from several distinct population

groups in different parts of the Old World, nonc of the ‘multiregionalists’
(like Milford Wolpoff: 1989a, b): who propose this claims that modern

Europeans are solely, directly or mainly descended from Neanderthals.

Moreover, to this non-expert reader at least, the weight of evidence in the

argument betweenmultiregionalists the and the ‘out of Africa’ school seems

to lieheavily with the latter. The whole notion of Neanderthals as literal

‘Ice People’ is clearly erroneous, since the furthest extent of Late Pleistocene

glaciation hardly overlaps at all with the known areas of Neanderthal

setlement: though that is not to say that some Neanderthal physical traits
did not result from adaptation to cold climates (Suinger and Gamble 1993:
10-11). Neanderthal physical appearance probably bore little relation to

Bradley’s image as Stringer and -

Gamble show, the classic picture of the
hirsutc, bectle-browed, stooped, thuggish ‘caveman’ is a product of Victor-
ian stereotyping, heavily tinged with racial ideology, rather than of the

archaeological evidence (ibid.: 16-33, and Plates 1-18; see also Trinkaus
and Shipman 1993: 398-410), Even the wide Neanderthal female hips of
which Bradley makes so much, associating them with childbearing and with
sexual incompatibilities passed on into the European present, become less

significant on closer inspection. Both sexes of Neanderthals had wide hips:

the trait had nothing to do with ‘extreme sexual dimorphism’ or with
childbearing. Finally, there is simply no evidence whatsoever for Bradley's
wild claims about Neanderthal psychology and cultural behaviour.
What is operating in the thought of David Bradicy and his Afrocentric
fellow-travellers is the kind of environmental—ancestral determinism which
was
widespread in certain versions of nineteenth-century European racial
‘science’ —
and also, incidentally, in the racial theories proposed by some
medieval Arab writers.” It had been common for anthropologists, wedded
to notions of white superiority, to argue that Africa’s environment acted to

block social development there. Henry Fairfield Osborn asserted: ‘The

evolution of man is arrested or
retrogressive in tropical and semt-tropical ...

regions, where natural fruits abound and human effort —

individual and
racial —

immediately ceases’ (quoted in Lewin 1987: 308). In 1933 Robert

Broom echoed this sentiment: ‘It seems
impossible for the higher types of
man even to live for any length of time inthe tropics without degenerating.
...
Apparently a
steady improvement of the brain was only possible in a
temperate climate’ (ibid.: 308).*
Much recently, John Baker, Richard
more Lynn and Carleton Coon have
revived similar ideas, while Philippe Rushton, too, has proposed his own

renovated version of the climatic-determinist theory. Indeed, there are

striking similarities among Cheikh Anta Diop’'s ‘two cradle theory’, Michael
 PSYCHOLOGY, RACE AND MAGIC MELANIN 273

Bradley’s ‘iceman hypothesis’, and

racist ideas of Lynn and
the Rushton
(see, for example, Lynn 1991), while
Bradley explicitly aligns himself with
Coon and with the older polygenicism of Franz Weidenreich (Bradley
1978/1991: ix).
In the contemporary Afrocentric version, however, rather than producing
a claim for white or Arab intellectual supremacy, early environment
accounts for black moral and spiritual superiority. The founding belief is
that Africans maintained a solidaristic, sociable, life-affirming character in
their hospitable original environment; whercas in the hostile climate and
circumstances of the north
specifically, —

Ages during
or more in the Ice
which European ‘cavemen’ are
erroneously thought to have evolved —

whites developed a correspondingly individualistic, selfish, aggressive

disposition.
As history and science, this is evidently laughable. More significant is that
the theories, and underlying assumptions, here are strikingly parallel to
those of much ninecteenth-century European racial discourse: the similarities
between Cress Welsing and Gobineau are
especially close. The science -

even the popular science of the late twentieth century

—
has little time for
such views. It is true that there is and will no doubt long continue to be
— -

scrious argument between those (like Robert Ardrey} who emphasize

aggression and competition as the keys to carly human development and
those (such as Richard Leakey) who urge instead the paramount import-
ance to evolution of peaceable co-operation. But these are
arguments about
the origins of humanity as @ whole, no serious scholar suggests that one or

the other bundle of such characteristics marks off ‘races’ from one another
—

no serious scholar, that is, unless one regards latter-day Euro-racists like

Lynn, Baker and Coon, or certain American Afrocentrists, as

deserving that
title. We shall sec below the assiduity with which some of the latter press
such essentialist —
if not racist —

claims.

Notes

1, St Clair Drake (1987: 107~14) offers a

thorough bibliography and literature review

of these various currents.

2. The best criucal accounts of these ideas [ have seen are Montellano (1991, 1992),
and especially his longer and more technical (1993). See also Wills (1994); Steve Jones
(1996: 184-97).
3. Lam indebted to Marek Kohn for this reference.
4. Elsewhere King has sought to underpin his claims about the preternatural wisdom
of ancient Africans by way of a quite bizarre ‘analysis’ of the finds from Tutankhamun’s
tomb, which, he believes, prove the Egyptians’ profound knowledge of the mystic powers
radiating from the pineal gland, melatonin, and melanin (King 1994),
5. There is an
implicit antiSemiusm in The Ieeman Inheritance, signalled by Bradley’s
view that the ‘purest’ descendants of the Caucasian-Neanderthals are modern Jews. A far
more explicit. and claborate statement of Bradley's case for the peculiarly asocral,
aggressive and miquitous influence of the Jews is made in his more recent Chosen People
from the Caucasus (1992b).
6. For more balanced though still controversial~

views of the Neanderthals, see —

Shreeve (1995); Stringer and Gamble (1993).

274 AFROCENTRISM

7. As Aziz Al-Azmch (1992) shows, medieval Arab

numerous writers, drawing on a

theory of climatic zones which have been

seems
origuially to
proposed by the Greeks, saw
black Africans as
suffering from mental deficiency resulting from life in excessive heat
and dryness: ‘Negroes therefore tended to be crratic
given to behaviour, to levity, to
prodigious sexuality, and to be much disposed to dance and rhythm, all because of the
afore-mentioned effects of the sun’ (1992: 9).
8. This claim refers to a
long-runumg colonial debate about the allegedly damaging
effects, physical and moral, of living mn tropical climates: see Kennedy (1990); Livingstone
(1994).
 21

Polemics and Prejudices: Sex, Race,

Religion and Afrocentrism

Much Afrocentric and related writing slips from ethnocentrism and neo-

conservatism into full-blown racism, sexism and homophobia. Such distaste-

ful aspects of the movement have already been alluded to at several points,
in relation to the ‘melanin scholars’, but it is in
especially necessary
conclusion to return to these themes in more detail.
In one sense, the single feature which most starkly marks out Afrocentric

writing on history and culture is a

single-minded insistence on the centrality
of race to all questions about human society. As we have scen, the general
tendency of modern scholarship in all fields and almost all parts of the
world since 1945 has been to question —

if not flatly deny —

the reality or

relevance of the concept of race. In the West, there have been two main
to this. One is among scholars of the radical right, ranging from
exceptions
the overtly racist ‘science’ of a Richard Lynn or Roger Pearson to the views
of Charles with their in the mainstream substantial
a Murray, presence now

of intellectual debate. The other is the Afrocentric tradition, whose propo-

nents have often insisted following Cheikh Anta Diop, although his stance,
—

like that of Du Bois or Jean Price-Mars, cannot fairly be called racist that —

denial of the reality of race is merely a Eurocentric obfuscation designed to

undermine African pride. The Afrocentrist amateur historian Legrand H.
Clegg exemplifies the in-your-face version of that attitude. Attacking ‘the
new anthropological party line’ which refuses the race concept, he pro-
claims that, by contrast:

we shall not only include race as an integral part of our historical writings,
but we shall prominently focus on it whenever and wherever the truth can

be told until sincere men of science return the Black race to its former

position of respect and reverence on the earth. (1989: 255)

Such be obscurantist, but it is not in itself a charter for

a
position may
intolerance —
even if it might easily open the way to one. Overt racial bigotry
is most evident, and most notorious, in Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
Accusations and counter-charges about the anti-white and, more
specifically,
sentiments expressed by Farrakhan and his followers have been
anti-Jewish
ane
276 AFROCENTRISM

a media staple for years, and I shall not try even to begin to summarize that
media Among the books sold and recommended
debate. by the Farrakhan
movement are not only such reputable works as
Rodney's How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, and Carter Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro,
but George James's Stolen Legacy, the Nation’s own The Secret Relationship
between Blacks and Jews, billed as ‘a true account of Jewish involvement in the

400-year plus Black Holocaust compiled from actual Jewish documents’, and

Bradley's The Iceman Inheritance. This last work, as we have seen, has become
a central textdisreputable ‘melanin
for the scholars’.' The most publicized
facet of this
organization’s racism is its anti-Semitism, which is indeed
vehement.” The objects of prejudice, however, do sometimes shift and
broaden. A cartoon in the issue of The Final Call immcdiatcly following the
1992 Los Angeles riots depicted ‘Ghetto Merchants’, moncy-laden, fleeing
the burning city. Once the stereotypes would doubtless have been Jewish
ones: now there is an Arab, a Korean and an Indian (The Final Call, 5 June
1992). Despite such occasional evidence of scattergun xenophobia, contro-
versy has centred on an
anonymously authored book published by Louis
Farrakhan's movement, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (Nation
of Islam 1991). The book is credited to the ‘Nation of Islam Historical
Research Department’, an
entity which has had no traceable existence or

publications apart from this work (see Gardell 1996: 260-61). Under the

guise of a scholarly treatise, and utilizing (though often misquoting or

otherwise abusing) a very wide range of sources, this is in reality a violently
anti-Jewish It massively exaggerates
tract. the role of various Atlantic Jewish
communities slavery a role which
in was in reality minuscule,
—

with the

partial exceptions of Jewish investors in the Dutch West India Company

(jewish investment there having been estimated as at different times
between 0.5 per cent and 10 per cent of the total, while the company itself
controlled, at its peak, a maximum 16 per cent of the Auantic slave trade
[D. Davis 1994: 15]), handful
Jewish plantation owners
a in Surinam
of
(Dutch Guiana), and
precisely quantifiable
a number
not of Portuguese
Marranos (Christians of actual, alleged or partial Jewish ancestry, who
formed a
significant portion of Portugal’s and her colonies’ populations
after the Inquisition).”
More revealing still of the book's real
repeated suggestion nature is the
that Jewish involvement in blameworthy than
slavery (no less and no more

the far greater Christian and Muslim embroilment, and hugely overstated

by mis-citation and innuendo) stems from some uniquely evil racial-religious

characteristic, and has subsequently been concealed by the all-too-predict-
able conspiracy of media and financial power. Yet The Secret Relationship is a
far cleverer work of propaganda than its crilics seem to assume. An

impressive amount of research albeit almost entirely in —

secondary sources

has gone into its compilation, however egregiously the results are then
misused. It does not directly claim, as responses from the Anti-Defamation

League and elsewhere asserted, that Jews are ‘genetically predisposed’

towards the exploitation of blacks; though the unwary reader might easily
 POLEMICS AND PREJUDICES 277

draw such a conclusion from it, and that, no doubt, was the anonymous
author’s intention. It draws attention dozens of times to instances across the
centuries and the continents when Jews were accused of rapacious and
dishonest business dealings. It never quite directly says that such accusations
were true, or that they reflect a noxious, invariant pattern of Jewish racial
behaviour. Nor, of course, does it say that they were not true: it just leaves
the reader to conclude that such multifarious and insistent charges must be
solidly based.

Charges of anti-Semitism in relation to Afrocentrism have been almost as

pointed, and as bitterly contested, in the context of the activities of two

academics, Leonard Jeffries and Tony Martin. Jeffries, as we have seen, is

no scholar. He has published little, and storms over his public statements

have related speeches and media outbursts

to rather than to writings in
even
pseudo-academic form. Tony Martin is a somewhat different matter.

He has been a
prolific author, notably on the life and ideas of Marcus
Garvey.
Yet in some Martin, who teaches
respects at the elite Wellesley College,
must be seen falling broadly under the same
as heading as Jeffries indeed, ~

it would seem, increasingly so. He could, for instance, proclaim that all
culture and learning in Europe throughout its history came from Africa,
whether through carly Egyptian influences or the eighth-century ‘African
invasion’ of Spain a more
sweeping assertion than almost any made by
—

Asante:

To be sure there was

learning in some parts of Europe before the Africans
invaded Spain —

there was learning in Greece and in Rome, and those parts

of Europe which were nearest historically came under
Africa and which
Africa’s civilising influence, it might possibly be stressing (sic) a point to
but

say that more distant parts of Europe like England, Scotland, Germany and
so on had any learning worth talking about before the Africans brought that
learning to Europe. (Addai-Sebo and Wong 1988: 136)

Martin’s impressive list of publications on Marcus Garvey and his move-

ment, most substantial of them his Race First (1976), have been marked by
an uncritical, cheerleading attitude towards their subject; but also by solid
research. His embroilment in controversy has resulted from work outside
his speciality, and especially from his teaching of an outline course in
African-American reading assignments to
History at Wellesley. For this, his
students apparently Relationship between
included Blacks and Jews. It
The Secret
is alleged that he persistently supported and amplified the book’s claims in
his teaching, and pressed students to do so also. Naturally, no one who was

not present in Professor Martin’s classroom at the relevant times can truly
judge whether his teaching included anti-Semitic themes or remarks, as

alleged. However, one can judge what is in the public domain, notably the
poisonous little book which Martin issued about the controversy, entitled
The Jewish Onslaught (Martin 1993). Here he not only engaged in unbroken
278 AFROCENTRISM

categorical claims about the vicious and manipulative nature of ‘the Jews’,
but went out of his way to scorn any idea that such claims might be true, if
at all, only of ‘some Jews’: ‘all kinds of Jews ...
generalize about “the Jews”
is yet another red and
when it suits them. The “some
Jews”business herring
The indiscriminate indeed.
attempt at special rules for
Jews’(ibid.: 37). —

ridiculous as well as
bigoted —
nature of Martin’s own critique is well
illustrated by his reprinting, under the title ‘Jewish Hate Mail’, just three
letters addressed to him: one racist diatribe from an
allegedly Jewish
correspondent, one
equally racist spicl expressing specifically, explicitly
Christian views, and onc entirely courtcous critique of Martin's stance (ibid.
108-10).
In classic Afrocentric style, Martin wields fantasized ideas about ancient

history as if they referred to what happened five minutes ago. Thus, because
the idea of a curse on the ‘sons of Ham’ derives from the Hebrew Torah/
Christian Old Testament, he proclaims: ‘Now it is the turn of the Jews to

react, apologize and pay reparations for their invention of the Hamitic

Myth, which killed many millions more than all the anti-Jewish pogroms
and holocausts in Europe’ (ibid.: 35).7 One could continue indefinitely to

be
detail the
bigotries and absurdities of JewishOnslaught, but it would
The
too depressing to trace further the degeneration into racist. fantasy of a

formerly reputable, if one-cyed, scholar.

In the controversy seemed
overto close ranks
Martin,in just Afrocentrists
the fashion some Jews, whites, Eurocentrists,
of them and so on of
accused

doing. Asante, reviewing The Jewish Onslaught, lavished quite unstinted praise
on this unpleasant outburst. It is, he said, ‘a polemic of the highest order’ -

the finest by an Afro-American since Walker’s Appeal of 1829 ‘a new —

literary event’, a work of ‘incredible power’ (Asante 1994: 118). It is, said
Asante, ‘only by reading The Jewish Onslaught that one can fully appreciate
the brilliant mind of Tony Martin’ (ibid.: 119). By contrast, it should be
noted that not only the vast majority of African-American political leaders,
but such major black scholars as Henry Louis Gates (1992, 1994) and
Cornel West (1993) have sharply repudiated all manifestations of black

Judacophobia.
‘Tendencies towards gender racial, and other group prejudices are not

confined to the pscudo-Islamists or the lunatic fringe of Afrocentrism. Even

Molefi Asante has also, it must be said, made disconcertingly bigoted
statements. There is no overt sign of his being ‘anti-whitc’ in any sense of

vulgar prejudice, or of identification with the wild beliefs about white

genetic inferiority proposed by some Afrocentrists. He has several times —

for instance in Newsweek, and in a sharp exchange with critic Diane Ravitch
—
insisted that Afrocentrism a movement
as is entirely {ree from racism or

ethnocentrism of any kind though one must add that

-
if he doesn’t think
then the word is
his own theories are
proudly, openly ethnocentric,
meaningless to him (Asante 199la, b). Asante has also dismissed any
that there could be trace of anti-white racism in his or
suggestion any any
other African-American’s thought —
not on the widely held, if contestable,
 POLEMICS AND PREJUDICES 279

ground that the label ‘racism’ is only by definition applicable to the

powerful, but on the odder basis that supposedly: ‘racism is based on
fantasy;
black views of whites are based on fact’ (Asante 1988: 32). His published
writings eschew the anti-Semitism which disfigures the work of some of his
colleagues, even if his gushing praise for Tony Martin's Jewish Onslaught
must give pause for thought here. Indeed, as we have seen, Asante’s works
are more marked by anti-Arab and anti-Muslim than by anti-Jewish animus.
What is far more overt is their homophobia. Homosexuality, says Asante,
‘cannot be condoned or
accepted as
good for the national development of
a
strong people’. It is:

a deviation from Afrocentric thought because it makes the person evaluate

his own physical needs above the teachings of national consciousness. ... We
can no
longer allow our social lives to be controlled by European decadence.
The time has come for us to redeem our manhood through planned
Afrocentric action. (1988: 57)

Here Asante reflects a much wider anti-feminist as well as

anti-gay trend.
Afrocentrists sec themselves opposing Western
as ‘decadence’, upholding
the integrity of the black family and family values. In this
they perpetuate a

long-standing black nationalist trope (see ‘It’s a

Family Affair’, in Gilroy
1993b), but they also echo much of the rhetoric of the New Christian Right.
There is therefore fierce opposition to feminism, which is, in classic fashion,
associated simply with hostility to men. Victor Okafor summarizes:

a clear need exists for the Africalogist, male or female, to avoid the Western
trap of
conceptualizing gender relations on the basis
antagonism of ...

generally speaking, the African male and his female (!) experience a more
harmonious relationship than their Western counterparts, despite the rela-
tive affluence of the West. The crumbling state of family institution
the in
the West testifies to this. In order to save the African family, African families
must guard against cultural aggression. Africans must guard against the set
of Western values, practices, and sexual habits which negates the family
institution. (Okafor 1991: 255)

In related fashion, of the

by British Afrocentrists
one few original works
(Ekwe-Ekwe Nzegwu and puts wildly idealized 1994) and homo- forward a

geneous picture of the ‘traditional’ African world-view (actually mostly

derived from the Nigerian ethnophilosopher J.A. Sofola [1973]) as the basis
for a revision of gender roles. The prescribed positions for women, despite
a few ritualistic preliminary allusions to African queens, are as mother,
provider and nurturer (Ekwe-Ekwe and Nzegwu 1994: 28~46). For men, the
prescriptions are all about fatherhood, leadership and discipline (ibid.:
46-50). Theend-goal is the promotion of ‘self-worth’ and, as usual with this
kind of writing, the authors’ ideas about what must be done for the future
280 AFROCENTRISM

of Afro-British communities include not a word on

political or economic

change of any kind.

There have been various rather vaguely formulated attempts, some of
them noted at various points above, suggest to affinities between Afrocentr-
ism and some strands of feminist thought, in terms ofshared
a
challenge to
materialist, rationist valucs and dominant systems knowledge, and per-
of

haps a common commitment to holism and_ spirituality. Attention to

women's roles in Afrocentric historiography, however, seems almost never

to have gone further than Diopian assertions about African matriarchy or

more or less imaginative listings of ‘great Nubian queens’ (for example,
Asante 1995a: 65, 68-9). The very few major efforts IT have found which

arguc for a
relationship between Afrocentricity and women’s studies —

notably D, Williams (1995) and some contributions to C. Sanders (ed.)

(1995), present a
picture interconnecting discourses.
of parallel rather than

Essayists in the latter volume, black women theologians mainly associated

with Howard University’s School of Divinity, range from seeing Afrocentrism
(almost entirely associated with Asante’s writings) and the ‘womanism’
propounded by writers like Alice Walker as
largely compatible (Gilkes 1995)
to very sharp critiques of Asante’s sexism (C. Sanders 1995b; D, Williams
1995).
Afrocentrism’s profound masculinist bias has often been noted and
criticized. It is a feature which it shares with the revived iconography of
Malcolm X, and with a
great deal of rap music and other male manifesta-
Asante’s pantheon of heroes and precursors in
tions ofhip hop culture.
have already is exclusively male. In his work and
Afrocentnicity, as we seen,

throughout the school he heads, as Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews

complain, an only marginally modified biological determinism is used to

underpin assertions of the ‘naturalness’ of male-headed families and tra-

ditional sexual hierarchy: “Thus, male-headed nuclear families are synony-
mous with strong functional families. Those who reject or challenge the
Eurocentric’
prescribed gender roles are dismissed as inauthentic and/or
(1993: 59; for some of the most extreme examples of the syndrome they
criticize, see Akbar 1991; Shahrazad Ali 1989). The implications are that
the of black America essentially behavioural rather than
problems are

economic; are uvernal (o its communities, with barely a nod to wider

structural pressures; and are centred on feckless, lazy, welfare-dependent
black mothers who raise their children without suitable male role models.
This has everything in common with the discourse of the New Right, and
with a traditionscapegoating which goes at least as far back as the 1960s
of
Moynihan report on the ‘pathology’ of black family structures. As Ransby
and Matthews scornfully conclude: ‘The solution, of course, is to celebrate
and recreate artificially the “greatness” and “authenticity” of a mythical and
generically ancient African family’ (1993; 60}.
In the eyes of some critics the patriarchal bias is closely linked to a class-

based one. Ransby and Matthews make this point in passing, secing
Afrocentric rhetoric as
implicitly invoking classic stereotypes of the dysfunc-
 POLEMICS AND PRE]JUDICES 281

tional black ‘underclass’ ({ibid.: 59-60). The argument is more central,

however, in polemics like that of the prolific black socialist scholar Manning
Marable, who sees the real origins of Afrocentrism like this:

The black-nationalist-oricnted intelligentsia, tied to elements of the new

African-American upper middle class by income, social

position and cultural
outlook, began to search for ways of expressing through the ‘perma-
itself
nent’ prism of race, while rationalising its relatively privileged class position.
(Marable 1993: 118-19)

Asante’s theories, in Marable’s view, represent the more scholarly and

philosophically coherent version of such elite self-rationalization. More

‘vulgar’ Afrocentrists among whom

-

Marable singles out Leonard Jeffries ~

not only espouse cruder,

a more dogmatic racial essentialism shot through
with anti-Semitic rhetoric, but express their elitist biases more nakedly:

Vulgar Afrocentrists deliberately ignored or obscured the historical reality of

social class stratification within the African diaspora. They essentially argued
that the interests people from
of Colin
all Powell black
(and) -
... ...

Clarence Thomas, unemployed, homeless

to andthehungry of black
America's decaying urban ghettoes were philosophically, culturally, and -

racially the same. As such, vulgar Afrocentrism

... was the perfect social

theory for the upwardly mobile black petty bourgeoisie. It gave them a vague
sense of ethnic superiority and cultural originality, without requiring the
hard, critical study of historical realities. ... It was, in short, only the latest
theoretical construct of a politics of identity, a worldview
racial designed to
discuss the world, but never really to change it. (ibid.: 121-2)

Given the evidence of wildly unscholarly statements from writers like Asante
that we have documented, one may think that Marable is overstating a

distinction between ‘scholarly’ ‘vulgar’ and Afrocentrists, but his overall

judgement has considerable weight. Many of the same

charges have been
levelled by radical or feminist Afro-American critics against major recent

currents in black US popular culture. The 1990s celebration and near-

deification of Malcolm X -

or, rather, of a
quite mythologized image of that

complex, rapidly changing man, above all in Spike Lee’s commercially

successful film —

is a case in point. The return of Malcolm X has coincided

and interrelated with the rise of Afrocentrism, and evinces the same

intensely elitist and masculinist bias. (The connections are

especially explicit
in Asante’s celebration of Malcolm X as revived ‘cultural hero’: Asante [ed.]
1993b.) As Ransby and Matthews point out, it has involved a
highly selective
reconstruction of the recent past, with the dichotomy between Malcolm and
Martin Luther King, the story of grass-roots
whole Civil Rights organizing,
and especially its female component, and Malcolm's own highly problematic
attitudes to gender (which he began to subject to autocritique at the very
end of his life), all airbrushed out. We are left with:
282 AFROCENTRISM

the disempowering misperception that only larger than life great men can

make or
change history, and that this process is an individual rather than
collective venture. The struggle for Black liberation is thus equated solely
with the struggle to redeem Black manhood by militant posturing heroes, .. .

not by the arduous and often unrewarding task of daily organizing.’ (Ransby
and Matthews 1993: 62)

The subsequent attempt by the Van Peebles posse cinematically to renovate

identification with the Black Panthers, evidently derivative of Lee's paint-

job on Malcolm X, has similar effects.
Still worse, in the context of gender roles and images, have been major
strands in rap music. Despite the presence of a handful of feminist-oricntated
women
rappers, and of mixed-sex groups like Arrested Development, whose

lyrics challenge stereotypes, the mainstream of rap (as of much white rock
music: though one must say bluntly that the worst of the rappers are more

regressive in this respect than any rock band [ have heard) is aggressively
sexist, At the extreme —
as with Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Ice Cube or

Public Enemy (an extreme which, in terms of sales and popularity, is a large
part of the mainstream)
—
violent misogyny is the rule. Critics like Tricia
Rose, who emphasize female participation and at least proto-feminism within

parts of the rap scene, often give the impression of clutching at straws (Rose
1994: esp. [46—-82; see, by contrast, the far more sceptical reflections of Paul

Gilroy [1994]; as well as Ransby and Matthews; and Lusane [1993: 52-4]).
The anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice we noted in relation to Asante is
a
pervasive phenomenon, largely ignored in the North Atlantic fixation on

purely bipolar ‘Africa versus the West’ or, more narrowly, ‘Blacks versus

Jews’ paradigms. We have seen how a fantasized picture of the Arabs as

relentless enemies of Africa, wreckers and traducers of all its indigenous

achievements, across several is millennia
purveyed in Chancellor Williams's
Destruction. of Black Civilization, and
faithfully copied by Asante and others.
Here, too, such otherwise bitter antagonists and ideological polar opposites
as the Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka (1985, 1991) and Chinweizu (1978,
1987) share much common ground both are marked by a deep dislike for
~

Arabs and Islam. For both of them, this hostility evidently owes much to

internal Nigerian north-south political schisms, though this is not openly

acknowledged. More generally, a perception of Arab imperialism, slave-
raiding and attempted conquest including alleged present-day expansion-
—

ism in
—

Africa, seen as directly analogous to or even worse than European

incursions, is the major motivator of antagonism. It has also found notable

literary expressions in Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968/1971)

and Ayi Kwer Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1973). It must be added that
the lines of prejudice between some black Africans and some Arabs by no
means run only one way. Not only is there a long and relatively neglected
tradition of anti-black prejudice in Arab culture analysed by A-LAzmech ~

(1992), by Murray Gordon (1989) and, in perhaps a less balanced way, by

Bernard Lewis (1986, 1990) which runs counter
—
to the genuine ‘colour
 POLEMICS AND PREJUDICES 283

blind’ universalism preached by Islam and evident in many modern Arab

states. There are also more
contemporary manifestations, some of which
are noted by Soyinka (1991) and by the American historians Dennis Hickey
and Kenneth Wylie (1993: 48-55).°
On the other hand, the African scholars most often cited as inspirations
by American Afrocentrists rarely appear to share their more
prejudiced
perspectives. Pushed to endorse Cress Welsing’s peculiar views, Cheikh Anta

Diop would only admit that yes, he believed that whites developed later
than blacks, as a result of depigmentation, and had their social outlook

shaped by a harsh environment, but: ‘we must be careful because, when we

deal in this abstract realm ... a

great deal of caution is necessary’ (Moore
interview 1989: 379). He also refused to commit himself on claims that
white racism developed as a result of consciousness of minority status, and
thus as a means of self-preservation; or that racism might be ‘a biological or

other type of instinct’ among ‘Aryans’ (ibid.: 379-80). Elsewhere he more

clearly repudiated such views, insisting throughout his major books on

environmental and cultural, rather than racial, determinism. He warned

repeatedly against reverse racism, and argued that while African civiliza-
tional achievements and moral codes were indeed superior to Eurasian
ones: ‘insofar as one can
speak of a race, the civilization that is his (the
African’s) might have been by any other
created human race
placed in so

favorable and
unique a so
setting’ (1974a: 235).
What is most disturbing is the extent to which claims of the kind made in
The Secret Relatonship have apparently gained fairly wide circulation,
especially through certain independent black radio stations (see, for

example, Fiske 1993: 273-5), in urban Afro-America. Only a handful of

academics among the most extreme Afrocentrists, notably Jeffries and
Martin, have publicly endorsed them. But they have taken their place, as a
kind of secret, forbidden and therefore all the more compelling knowledge.
They circulate alongside such beliefs as those that the Atlantic slave trade

actually claimed perhaps a 100 or 150 million victims killed or enslaved,

rather than the 10-15 million range within which serious historians’
estimates cluster
(surely monstrous enough figures in themselves!"), that
the AIDS and crack epidemics are genocidal conspiracies against blacks, the
deranged pseudo-scientific claims of a Frances Cress Welsing or Richard
King, and so on.
Marimba Ani’s book Yurugu, which we have already discussed as
perhaps
the most intellectually impressive single work yet to appear from US
Afrocentric circles, is none the less prey to such fantasies. Ani accepts the

‘Aryan myth’ wholesale, for instance in relation to India and the caste

system (1994: 285-6). She relies heavily on a handful of century-old,

classically racist indeed, -

proto-fascist works -

by writers
Winthrop like
Stoddard, Gobineau, and Madison Grant as
supposedly representative
examples of ‘white nationalism’. When she wants an
up-to-date instance, she
has to turn to P.W, Botha (ibid.: 288)i Even with Botha, who would surely
be thought quite capable of condemning himself out of his own mouth, she
284 AFROCGENTRISM

resorts to a
newspaper report of a newspaper report, involving an American
black nationalist student’s alleged paraphrase of a South African reporter's
paraphrase of what Botha is supposed to have said, but much of which is
utterly implausible as a version of the public words of that canny politician.
It may seem absurd to complain of an African-American author ‘misrepre-
senting’ a political figure as bloodstained as Botha; but surely if truth and

accuracy matter at all, they matter in all political situations.

That last sentiment would be not so much disputed as dismissed out of
hand by those who insist that there are only local, situation-specific truths.
We have already looked at the endorsements of certain less-than-plausible
Afrocentric claims by high-profile figures like cultural critic bell hooks,
bestselling popular historian Leronc Bennett and philosopher of science
to be different
Sandra Harding. The basis for their enthusiasm would seem

in each Bennett of adherence to anything other than a

case. gives no sign
straightforward realist (what opponents misname an
empiricist) notion of
historical truth, and presumably therefore supports claims about ancient
African trips to the Americas because, not having looked at the evidence
he thinks they truce. In hooks’s she endorses the same
closely, are case,

claims because she finds them politically inspiring and, one ~

takes it, also
thinks they are true. Harding adheres to a version of ‘standpoint epistemol-

ogy’: that is (crudely), what is true depends substantially on where you're

mainly in terms of gender and,
looking from, with the ‘where’ understood
secondarily, race.
A far more alarmingly glib and sweeping version of that stance is proposed

by Media Studies guru John Fiske. He details, in a tone that veers between
the neutral and the approving, a whole series of (in my view) absurd,
Afro-
damaging, paranoid and racist beliefs he has encountered among
Americans, including the theories of Cress Welsing and Leonard Jeffries -—

notions of whites as devils, as congenitally evil, and so on (Fiske 1993:

227302 passim’). He focuses especially on the ‘Cress Theory’ of mherent
black superiority, which he approves because it gives whites ‘deconstructive

jolts’:

If the Cress Theory is racist, and to some

eyes it will inevitably appear so, it is

‘weak’ racism, defensive and not imperialist. ,..

[It] is used not to justify a

future Black domination of whites, but to empower the Black refusal of white

domination...
The primary function of these Black insights whiteness
strengthen
mto is to
African Americans in their daily lives ... but
glimpsed overheard
when by or

whites they are

equally uscful in disturbing white knowledge of itself.
I do then endorse the Cress theory and equivalent Black knowledges, not
for any essential ‘truth’, but for their deconstructive counter to white ways of

knowing whiteness. (1993: 283-4)

the respected white Australian-born academic who skilfully

John Fiske,
deploys the fashionable language of deconstruction and extreme relativism,
 POLEMIGS AND PREJUDICES 285

is more wildly and culpably wrong, perhaps, than any other author cited in
this book. No one is or can ever
possibly be ‘empowered’ or ‘strengthened’
by believing in lies and fantasies. No better society, or even better social
attitudes, can be built on them. None of the ideas Fiske mentions, and none

of those which have been the main subjects of this book, offers any strategies
whatsoever for improving the lot of the poor, oppressed and underprivi-
leged, whether in North America, in Europe or in Africa. They need
accurate information about their world more than anyone else, if they are

ever to change it.

As for such ideas being ‘overheard’ by whites, the effect is highly unlikely
to be that of a
productive ‘disturbing’ of white ‘knowledge of itself” (the
very use of the singular, abstract term carries a
great burden of racial
essentialism: what on earth is whiteness itself?). What it would ‘disturb’ if it
were taken seriously, taken representative
as or authoritative for black social

thought, are the true ‘knowledges’ that people of African descent are as

rational, capable of
as
constructing coherent social, historical, psychological
and political theories as
anyone else, and that they are not typically
consumed by incoherent fantasies of revenge or compensatory delusions of

past and future glory. Extreme Afrocentrism and associated theories are the
white racist’s dream come true. If Asante or Cress Welsing and the rest did
not exist, racists would have had to invent them —

but they wouldn’t have

had the necessary imagination. Only a
great novelist could have dreamed

up anything as wild as some of the theories we have been examining. In a

way, a great novelist already had. Here is Ralph Ellison's Jnvasible Man, back
in 1952, caught in a
nightmare vision of mad preacher and entranced

congregation:

‘Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the “Blackness of Blackness”.

And a
congregation of voices answered: “That blackness is most black,
brother, most black...
‘In the beginning...’
‘At the very start’, they cried.
‘.,. there was blackness...’
‘Preach it... (Ellison 1983: 12)

And so, ever more insanely, on. Ellison's preacher is a bad dream. His Ras
the Exhorter, the Garveyite fantasist of racialrevenge, is a down-at-hecl
street agitator. Some of their successors, weaving delusions of black atoms

and black Pharaohs at the beginning and end of everything, are university
professors and designers of school curricula. Within the group which has
been perhaps the most consistently oppressed of all victims of racial

thinking, a new structure of such thought has emerged, the mirror-image of

that which for so long attacked those for whom it claims to speak. It is all

unutterably sad.
286 AFROCENTRISM

Notes

1. See regular full-page advertusements im its newspaper, The [nal Call, The mail-order
booklists advertised by the rival African Islamic Mission include fewer works
of this nature,

though The Iceman Inheritance is sold by them.

2. For a of the controversy, perhaps all the more damning im the light of its
summary
author's sympathetic attempt to present the Farrakhan movement’s side of the story, see

Gardell (1996; 245-84).

3, For genumely scholarly overviews of Jewish participation in the Atlantic slave trade
and New World slaveowning, see Drescher (1993); D. Davis (1994). A more
polemical
to the Farrakhan's movement's book, not without its own ethnocentric touches,
response
is Brackman (1992).
4, There is, of course, no textual or intrinsic reason whatsoever to identify this biblical
story with racial theones: that association came many centuries later, At the very carliest,
it can be traced to the Babylonian Talmud of the third century Ce: and then only most
It intriguing in this context that liberal Isracli circles, the
ambiguously. is in
present-day
vernacular Hebrew term ‘Kushim’ for black Africans is regarded as politically dubious,
because of its associations tenuous though they are with such ideas.
— —

5. See also White (1990) on Afrocentric masculinism; and Decker (1994) for its
For of the ‘erisis of black
manifestations in rap music, a more
analytical overview
manhood’ in the USA, see Majors and Gordon (1994); plus for the predictable claim ~

that Afrocentric education has the answers to it —

W. Oliver (1989).
6. St Clair Drake, once more, attempts to bridge the gulls between rival, ideologically
charged views about historical Muslim and
Jewish racial atutudes (1990).
7. As we have seen, a recent volume in the formerly reputable For Beginuers series . .

(Anderson 1995) reproduces such claims; while Louis Farrakhan has also done so (see
Gardell 1996; 256). This is yet another area of great uncertamty, but taking a
rough
midpoint of different modern historians’ calculations, it
might be suggested that probably
about ten million African people were forcibly transported to the New World, while
another three million died or were killed in the course of capture and transit. The Arab-
dominated slave trades across the Sahara, Red Sea and Indian Ocean abducted possibly
another five million. Somewhere between ten and eighteen million more
people were
enslaved within the African continent over the past four centuries (this is necessarily the
unclear figure of all) by colonial, and im a few cases even
contemporary
most
indigenous,
postcolomial states. This last is worth despite their humanitarian and
all
pomt emphasizing:
colonial retained,
in Africa
‘eiilizing’ protestations, European regimes compromised
with or acuvely furthered local slave regimes, while human rights organizations at the end
modes of
persistence ‘traditional’
of the twenticth century have repeatedly noted the of
enslavement in such states as Mauritania. For a succinct overview
of the state of knowledge,
see
Lovejoy (1982); for an indication of the difficulues of quantification, especially for the
Adantic trade’s earliest stages, see Elbl (1997).
8. Fiske returns themes
later (1994). In ‘Blackstream
to the sameKnowledge’ he
parades agnosticism over whether
ostentatious the AIDS epidemic ts indeed the result of
a deliberate genocidal plot agamst blacks, quotes extensively from transcripts of indepen-
dent black radio talk-shows replete with ridiculous, paranoid claims about whites’ devilish
plots, nonsensically false AIDS statistics, and so on (inserting not a word of scepticism or
demur about any of these), and concludes that since it would be more damaging nol to
believe such stories if they were true than to believe them if they were false, he will choose
to believe them. There could be no more pitiable an abdication of the mtellectual’s

responsibility.
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IST.
ST. UNIV,
Uy ORTENTALE
Ay,
CRATE gy
 Index

Abraham, Alton 63 Anti-Defamation League 276

Adams, William Y. 138, 139-40, 141, anti-Semitism 8, 91, 176, 194, 195,
142-3, 146 204, 208-9, 218, 226, 253, 273,
Adams, Hunter Havelin II 258, 261, 276, 277-8, 281
268, 269 apartheid 13, 88, 120, 147, 236, 247
African Heritage Studies Association Appiah, Kwame Anthony 16, 52, 112,
60, 61, 62 160, 161, 186, 206, 207
African Islamic Mission (USA) 72, Aquinas, Thomas 152
286 Arabs, Arabia 15, 46, 54, 80, 118,
African Liberation Support 119, 120, 135, 137, 140, 144,
Committee (USA) 13, 27 147-9, 150, 152, 154, 172, 177,
African Studies Association (USA) 6, 181, 190, 208, 218, 219-20, 226,
60-63, 217 228, 234-5, 237, 238, 243, 245,
AIDS 222, 250, 267, 283, 286 248, 257, 258, 272, 273, 274, 276,
Akbar, Na‘im 266 279, 282-3, 286
Akhnaten, Pharoah 123, 127, 176 Aristotle 126, 127, 128, 205, 209, 210
Al-Arabi, Ibn 152 Armah, Ayi Kwei 57, 238, 282
AlL-Azmeh, Aziz 273 Arrested Development (rap group)
Algeria 78, 81, 132 282
Ali, Ahmed and Ibrahim 253 ‘Aryans’
/‘Aryanmyth’ 15, 47, 115,
Ali, Noble Drew 49, 72 171, 177, 193, 194-5, 196, 201,
Allen, Robert L. 91 204, 207, 210, 211, 225, 283
Althusser, Louis 158, 161 Asante, Molefi K. 11, 15, 16, 57, 67,
Amenhotep II, Pharoah 45 72, 79, 86, 130, 147, 148, 153,
American Negro Leadership 180, 207, 215, 216, 218, 228,
Conference on Africa 13 230-39, 240-44, 246, 247, 254,
Amin, Idi 243 255, 257, 260, 263, 277, 278-9,
Amin, Samir 12 280, 281, 285
Andah, Bassey 191 Asante, Kariamu Welsh 236, 243
Ani, Marimba 11, 188, 247-9, 257, Ashanti/Asante people 40, 148, 226,
283-4 230, 234
Ansaru Allah Community 227 Askia, Mohammed 46

R97
326 BIBLIOGRAPHY

—(1936) The
African Background Outlined: Or, Handbook for the Study of the
Negro (Washington, DC).
Woodyard, Jeffrey Lynn (1991) ‘Evolution Discipline: Intellectual
of a

Antecedents of African American

Studies’,Journal ofBlack Studies 22, 2.
—

(1995)‘Locating Asante: Making Use of The Afrocentric Idea’, in Ziegler

(ed.),
The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of
Wright, Patrick (1995)
Tyneham (London).
Wright, Richard (1954) Black Power: A Record of Reactions nmLand
a
of Pathos
(New York).
Wright, Richard A. (ed. 1984) African Philosophy: An Introduction (3rd edn;
first pub, 1979. Lanham, MD).
Wuthenau, Alexander von (1987) ‘Unexpected African Faces in pre-
Columbian America’, in Van Sertima (ed.).
X, Malcolm and Haley, Alex (1965) The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New
York: cited from 1968 Penguin edn).
Yansane, Aguibou Y. (1985) ‘Cultural, Political and Economic Universals in

Africa’,
West in Asante and Welsh Asante (eds).
Yates, Frances (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London).
—-(1972) The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London).
Black Racism and
Young, Robert J.C. (1994) ‘Egypt in America: Athena,
Colonial Discourse’, in Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood (eds) Racism,
Modernity and
Identity (Cambridge).
——(1995) Colontal Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London).
Yurco, Frank (1989) ‘Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White?’ Biblical

ArchaeologicalReview 15.

——(1996) ‘Black Athena: An Egyptological Review’, in Lefkowitz and Rogers

(eds).
Zachernuk, Philip S. (1994) ‘Of Origins and Colonial Order: Southern

Nigerian Historians and the “Hamitic Hypothesis”, c.1870-1970’, Journal

of African History 35, 3.
Zack-Williams, Alfred (1995) ‘Development and Diaspora: Separate Con-
cerns?’, Review of African Political Economy 65.
Indeed.",in Ziegler (ed.).
Zaremba, AlanJay (1995) ‘Asante.

Ziegler, Dhyana (1995a) ‘Preface’, inZiegler (ed.).

—(1995b) ‘Molefi Kete Asante: Undefined by the Mass Media’, in Ziegler
(ed.).
——(1995c) ‘Conclusion: A Beginning’, in Ziegler (ed.).
——~(ed. 1995) Molefi Kete Asante and Afrocentricity: In Praise and in Cnizcism

(Nashville, TN).
Zouber, M.A. (1977) Ahmad Baba de Toumbouctou: sa we et son axwore (Paris).
Zureik, Elia T. (1979) The Palestinians in Israel: A Study on Internal Colonialism
(London).

IST, Uh CALE
N. Inv 22044ie} Qi]12:G4 data
 Index

Abraham, Alton 63 Anti-Defamation League 276

Adams, William Y. 138, 139-40, 141, anti-Semitism 8, 91, 176, 194, 195,
142-3, 146 204, 208-9, 218, 226, 253, 273,
Adams, Hunter Havelin II 258, 261, 276, 277-8, 281
268, 269 apartheid 13, 88, 120, 147, 236, 247
African Heritage Studies Association Appiah, Kwame Anthony 16, 52, 112,
60, 61, 62 160, 161, 186, 206, 207
African Islamic Mission (USA) 72, Aquinas, Thomas 152
286 Arabs, Arabia 15, 46, 54, 80, 118,
African Liberation Support 119, 120, 135, 137, 140, 144,
Committee (USA) 13, 27 147-9, 150, 152, 154, 172, 177,
African Studies Association (USA) 6, 181, 190, 208, 218, 219-20, 226,
60-63, 217 228, 234~5, 237, 238, 243, 245,
AIDS 222, 250, 267, 283, 286 248, 257, 258, 272, 273, 274, 276,
Akbar, Na‘im 266 279, 282-3, 286
Akhnaten, Pharoah 123, 127, 176 Aristotle 126, 127, 128, 205, 209, 210
Al-Arabi, Ibn 152 Armah, Ayi Kwei 57, 238, 282
AlAzmeh, Aziz 273 Arrested Development (rap group)
Algeria 78, 81, 132 282
Ali, Ahmed and Ibrahim 253 ‘Aryans’
/‘Aryanmyth’ 15, 47, 115,
Ali, Noble Drew 49, 72 171, 177, 193, 194-5, 196, 201,
Allen, Robert L. 91 204, 207, 210, 211, 225, 283
Althusser, Louis 158, 161 Asante, Molefi K. 11, 15, 16, 57, 67,
Amenhotep II, Pharoah 45 72, 79, 86, 130, 147, 148, 153,
American Negro Leadership 180, 207, 215, 216, 218, 228,
Conference on Africa 13 230-39, 240-44, 246, 247, 254,
Amin, Idi 243 255, 257, 260, 263, 277, 278-9,
Amin, Samir 12 280, 281, 285
Andah, Bassey 191 Asante, Kariamu Welsh 236, 243
Ani, Marimba 11, 188, 247~9, 2577, Ashanti/Asante people 40, 148, 226,
283~—4 230, 234
Ansaru Allah Community 227 Askia, Mohammed 46

397
 328 INDEX

Assmann,Jan 128, 135, 211 124, 132, 133, 134, 135, 186, 191,
Association for the Study of Classical 193-211, 231, 232, 235, 243, 258
African Civilisations 124 Bernstein, Richard 7
Astour, Michael 202, 209 Berry, Mary F. 59
Athens 38, 44, 198, 201, 206, 207 Biko, Steve 82
Attica prison revolt 95 Biobaku, S.O. 120
Augustine of Hippo 38 Black Aesthetic movement 27, 144
Axum kingdom 138, 141, 144, 237, Black Panthers 77,78, 97, 216, 282
238 Blackman, Peter 105
Blake, William 64, 123
Baba, Ahmed 46, 150, 151, 154 Blassingame,
John W. 59

Bachofen,J.J. 168, 175 Blauner, Robert 91, 92-3

Baines,John 11, 154, 195, 198, 199, Blavatsky, Helena 65
200
Blayechettai,
J.E.C. 35, 47-—8
Baker, Houston A. Jr. 236 Bloom, Allan 8

Baker,John R. 166, 268, 272, 273 Blumenbach, J.F. 43, 210

Baldwin,James 187, 189 Blyden, Edward W. 23, 24, 25, 39, 56,
Baldwin,Joseph A. (AKA Kobi K. K. 75
Kambon) 244, 245-6, 269 Boas, Franz 46, 51
Balfour Declaration 226 Bornu 143
kingdom
Baltimore 3, 35, 42, 43, 224 Botha, P.W. 283-4
Bannceker, Benjamin 39, 262 Brace, GC.Loring 11, 132-3, 134-5,
Bantu languages 103, 148, 154, 145, 191
156-7, 158, 173, 180 Bradley, Michael 248, 250, 2'70-72,
Banu Hilal people 148-9 272-3, 276
Baraka, Amiri/Leroi Jones 93, 96-7, Brathwaite, Edward 106, 107
106, 215-6, 218 Brazil 101, 102, 104, 111, 233
Barlow,Joel 123 Brendan, St., legend of 250-1
Beethoven, Ludwig van 38, 53, 56, Britain/British 2,7, 8, 15, 42, 57, 67,
63 69, 73, 82, 88, 98, 109, 110, 112,
Bekerie, Ayele 241, 243 115-6, 117, 118, 142, 169, 184,
Bell, Augustus T. 36, 63 188, 194, 198, 203, 210, 226, 229,
Bello, Muhammad, Sultan of Sokoto 244, 252-3, 2545
121, 152 British Museum 142, 154, 298
Benin 40, 105, 115, 159 Brooks, Alison 34

Ben-Jochannan, Yosef ix, 11, 15, 63, Browder, Anthony T. 70, 124, 135,
66, 67, 69, 72, 77, 124, 127, 147, 136
152, 181, 217, 218, 223-6, 297, Browder, Atlantis Tye 124
228-9, 231, 244, 253, 259, 261 Browder, Earl 90
Bennett, Lerone 21, 284 Brown, E. Ethelred 75
Bent, J. Theodore 117-8 Brown, George W. 59
Bentham,Jeremy 237 Brown, William Wells 35, 39
Ber, Sunni Ali 151 Browning, Robert 38, 53, 56
Berber people 42, 132, 149, 150 75
Bruce,John E. 70,
Bernal, Martin 4, 8, 11, 67, 117, 123, Brunson, 133-4
James
 INDEX 329

Buganda 173 Clegg, Legrand H. Il 257, 275

Burkert, Walter 207-8 Cleopatra 10, 38, 122, 123, 130, 136

Cole, J. Augustus 42
Cain 37 Communism/Communists 52, 53,
Cairo 125, 151, 183, 184, 191, 206 88-90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 217
Alrick 109-10 Connah, Graham 146, 153
Cambridge,
Canaanite people 40, 109, 229 Connor, Walker 1
Canada 2, 89 Coon, Carleton 29, 30, 177, 272, 273
Cann, Rebecca 29, 30 Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine 182
Caribbean 1, 12-13, 24, 26, 73-86, Coulanges, Fustel de 164

88, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109, 110, Councill, W.H. 35, 42, 56
111, 217, 233, 249 Cowan, L. Gray 62-3
Crawford, Clinton 15
Carlyle, Thomas 45, 55, 60, 236
Carmichael, Stokely 78, 91-2, 94 Cress Welsing, Frances
218, 221,
124, 205-6,H. 229.3, 22'7, 298, 248, 255, 256,
Carruthers, Jacob
216, 217, 228, 247, 257 261, 266-7, 268, 269-70, 271,
Carthage, Carthaginians 36, 37, 43, 283, 284, 285
250 Crowder, Michael 169

Carver, 262, 270 Crummell, Alexander 37, 39, 40, 55,

George Washington
Castoriadis, Cornelius 198 56, 75, 76
Caton Gertrude 118 Cruse, Harold 90, 91, 217, 254
Thompson,
Césaire, Aimé 24, 27, 107, 164, 260 Cuba 73, 102
Challaoueliziczese, Cullen, Countee 105
Wyxzewixard S.J.
261-2
Cheops, Pharoah 1773 Dafa‘alla, Samia 191

Chicago 21, 63, 64, 70, 80, 269 Dahomey kingdom 40

Childe, V. Gordon 117, 196 Dakar, University of 164, 165, 177
China/Chinese 12, 15, 32, 45, 119, Damas, Leon 24
193, 227, 253 Darfur kingdom 143
Chinweizu 251, 282 Darwin, Charles/Darwinism 30, 43,
Christianity/Christians 26, 38, 41, 47, 44
48, 55, 65, 66, 67, 71, 74, 101, Dathorne, O.R. 110,112
102, 105, 122, 123, 127, 134, 139, Davidson, Basi! 116, 124-5, 129, 133,
146, 152, 156~7, 158, 176, 205, 195, 204, 245
299-3, 295, 296-7, 252, 255, 257, Davis, Anthony 1
265, 276, 278, 279 57
deGraft-Johnson, J.C.
Christophe, Henry 223 Dejezer, Pharoah 173
Churchward, Albert 65, 67-9, 71, 72, Delafosse, Maurice 116
181, 221, 225, 235, 252-3, 257 Delany, Martin 24, 25, 47
Clark, Kenneth 91
Derrida,Jacques 157, 240
Henrik
32, 57, 60-62, Dessalines,Jean-Jacques 223
Clarke,John
64, 124, 140, 152, 216-8, 220, Detroit 3, 227
228, 236, 253, 262~3 15
Dewey,John
Clarke, Sebastian 56~7 Diagne, Pathe 185-6

Cleage, Albert B. 227, 229 Diawara, Manthia 110

Cleaver, Eldridge 78, 93, 94 diffusionism 28, 31-2, 48, 117, 130,
 330 INDEX

140, 145, 153, 177-8, 186, 198, 202, 204—5, 206, 207, 208-9, 216,
210, 221, 232 217, 219, 220, 221, 225-6, 227,
Diodorus of Sicily 140, 155, 191 228, 231-2, 234, 235, 237-8, 243,
Diop, Cheikh Anta
4, 8, 10, 11, 31,
x, 244, 246, 247, 249, 252-3, 255,
33, 47, 49, 57, 80, 103, 110, 116, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266,
119, 121, 125, 130, 132, 133, 134, 269, 273, 277
135, 136, 147, 150-51, 153, 154, Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert 112, 279
161, 163-92, 194, 195, 202, 204, ELAmin, Mustafa 71]
205, 206, 217, 225, 226, 228, 231, Ellis, George W. 46-7, 192
232, 235, 236, 241, 242, 243, 245, Ellison, Ralph 104, 285
253, 255, 257, 260, 270, 272, 275, Emerson, R.W. 45
280, 283 England/English 4, 47, 49, 63, 67, 88,
Diouf, Mamadou & Mbodj, 93, 104, 123, 161, 220, 226, 230,
Mohamed 166, 169, 181, 182, 252, 257, 258, 262, 277
187 Enlightenment, 7, 20, 64,
European
DNA 29-30,
134-5, 137, 144 124, 257
Dogon people 157-8, 172, 189, 247, Equiano, Olaudah 50
259, 269-70 Esan people 120

Dorsainvil,
Justin 83 Ethiopia (state) 28, 29, 32-3, 35, 45,
Douglass, Frederick 3 47-8, 49, 56, 73, 104, 111, 138,
Dover, Kenneth 207 144, 154, 175, 195, 219, 220-21,
Drake, St.Clair
4, 53-4, 64, 70, 136, 226, 228, 234, 253, 255, 256, 260
229, 250, 255-7, 286 ‘Ethiopians’ (nineteenth -century
Dr. Dre 282 synonym for ‘Negro’) ix, 32, 35,
D’Souza, Dinesh 3, 7-8, 9 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47-8, 55,
Du Bois, W.E.B. 25, 45, 48, 50-53, 73, 119, 120, 134, 147, 198, 206.
54, 55, 57, 58, 69-70, 75, 77, 83, ethnophilosophy 24, 158-62, 167,
84, 106, 236, 245, 247, 254, 256, 170, 236, 246, 279
275 Euclid 38, 152
Dumas, Alexandre (Pere) 38 Eurocentrisin 1, 2, 16, 20, 58, 107,
Durkheim, Emile 26 116, 145, 160, 161, 170, 188, 203,
Dutch West India Company 276 205, 208, 221, 231, 233, 235, 236,
Duvalier, Francois 84-5 243, 245, 247, 249, 251, 254, 275,
278, 280
Early, Gerald 6 ‘Eve’ 28, 30, 254
Easton, Hosea 35, 36—7
Edwards, David N. 143-4 Fanon, Frantz 24, 26, 77-81, 94, 216,
Egypt ix-x, 2, 4,7, 9-10, 14, 15, 21, 236, 265
22, 32, 33-58 passim, 64, 66-72, Farrakhan, Louis 50, 55, 71, 73, 77,
73, 108, 109, 110, 115, 116, 118, 86, 108, 112, 218, 275-6, 286
119-20, 122-37, 138-50, 152, Fell, Barry 250
153, 154-5, 158, 159, 163, 164, feminism 11, 20, 29, 98, 110, 175,
165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 259, 279, 280, 281, 282
173-4, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, Ferris, William H. 45-6, 56, 75
180, 181, 182-5, 186, 187-8, 189, Feycrabend, Paul 20
190-92, 193, 194-8, 199-200, Finch, Charles 188, 255
JEX 331

48, 66, 68, 73, 116, 123-4,

127-9, 130, 131, 134, 136, 152-3,
155, 158, 159, 164, 165, 167, 169,
174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 188, 191,
194-5, 196-7, 198-201, 202,
203~11, 220, 222, 225, 226, 232,
253, 260, 274, 277
Greenberg,Joseph 167, 183, 185
Greenblatt, Stephen 10
Griaule, Marcel 157-8, 162, 172,
236, 247, 269-70
Guyana 81, 82

Habermas,Jurgen 16
Haggard, H. Rider 117, 123
Haiti 24, 25, 39, 51, 83-5, 102, 104
111, 218, 223
Haley, Alex 108, 152, 190
Hall, Edith 155, 200-201
Hall, Richard Nicklin 118
Hall, Stuart 12, 13
Ham (Biblical figure), ‘Sons of Ham’
36, 37, 38, 42, 56, 278
Hamilton, Alexander 53
Hamilton, Charles 91-2
Hamites 32, 35, 43—4, 46, 47, 50, 51,
115-17, 118, 119-20, 132, 153,
177, 224
Hansberry, William Leo 49, 57, 217,
218
Harding, Sandra 259, 284
Harding, Vincent 15, 59
Harding, Warren 53
Harlem
31, 64, 90, 154, 217, 220,
224, 226, 241, 261
Hartog, Francois 153, 200
Hayne, Joseph E. 35, 47, 75
Hegel, G.W.F. 45, 164, 236
Heraclitus 129
Herodotus 38, 40, 46, 48, 119,
152-3, 155, 193, 200, 205, 206,
209, 225, 227, 242
Hermeticism 67, 68, 76, 123
Herrnstein, Richard 20
Herskovits, Melville J. 101, 102-3,
116
 INDEX
332
53
Higgins, Godfrey 64, 65, 221 Jackson, Andrew
111 Jackson, George 78, 95,97
Hill, Anita
64, 123 Jackson, John G. 11, 35, 57, 67, 130,
Hill, Christopher
G. 247 135, 217, 220-21, 225, 238, 253,
Hilliard, Asa 124,
Hilliard, David 78 257, 258
Holocaust/Shoah, Nazi 195, 204, Jahn, Janheinz 103
996, 244, 248, 266, 278 Jamaica 44, 53, 73, 74,77, 81, 85,

Afrocentrists’ 223, 228, 101, 102, 207, 218

homophobia,
278 James, C.L.R. 25, 77
James, G.G.M. 11, 15, 63, 66, 69, 70,
hooks, bell 98-9, 251, 284
72, '73, 128, 181, 188, 204—5, 220,
Hopkins, Pauline 35, 55
995, 298, 253, 276
Horton, James ‘Africanus’ 25, 35, 38,
42, 50 Japan/Japanese 40, 227, 253
68, 234, 259, Jaspers, Karl 103
Horus (Egyptian god) 53
261
Jefferson, Thomas
Jeffries,Leonard 61, 64, 124, 190,
Howard University 8, 218, 280 215, 221-2, 228, 231, 270, 277,
Hountondji, Paulin J. 159, 160, 161 281, 283, 284
Houston, Drusilla Dunjee 35, 48-9 38, 43, 73, 141,
Nathan 15, 59
Jesus of Nazareth
Huggins, 223, 271
Huggins, Willis N. 35, 917, 220-21 Jews/Judaism 7, 39, 44, 68, 73,91,
Hughes, Langston 105, 106 112, 116, 120, 124, 127, 194, 195,
Hughes, Robert 3, 8, 11, 186, 259 196, 202-4, 209, 222, 225, 226,
Huiswood, Otto 89, 91
998, 229, 244, 255, 260, 266, 273,
Hurston, Zora Neale 104
275-7, 278, 282, 286
Hutu people 225 28, 29
Johansen, Donald
Hyksos 202, 203, 206 Charles 24, 106,
Johnson,
107
Johnson, Edward A. 71,95,
282
Ice Cube Johnson, Harvey 35, 42-3
148
Igbo people 50, Johnson,John H. 49
site 173 120, 169
Igbo Ukwu burial Johnson, Samuel
India,Indians (of Asia) 15, 21, 38, 40, Johnston, Harry 52, 115
48, 82, 124, 133, 244, 257, 276, Joseph, Gloria I. 110-11
283 Joyce,James 258
‘Indians’ (of the Americas) 21, 53, Just, Ernest Everett 262
172, 230, 233, 247, 250, 251
Inuit people 172, 252 Kagame, Alexis 158, 160, 161
Ireland/Irish 7, 15, 68, 88, 99, 203, Kanem kingdom 143
950, 253, 257 Karenga, Ron 11, 27,78,
‘Maulana’
Islam/Muslims 12, 39, 46, 49, 70, 71, 94, 124, 128, 215-16, 220, 231,
79, 85, 94, 95, 108, 120, 121, 135, 235, 236, 243, 247, 275, 261
138, 149, 150-52, 154, 163, 172, Keita, S.O.Y. 132, 133, 136
175, 176, 209, 226, 227, 228, 234, Kenya 29, 180

935, 975, 276, 277-8, 282 Kerma 141, 143

207, 210, Keto, C. Tsehloane 254
Isracl 50, 88, 109, 176-7,
257, 236 Khaldun, Ibn 149, 235
 INDEX 333

Khartoum 237 Macedonia 211

Khoi peoples 148 Mackey, Nathaniel 107

Kikuyu people 148 Madoc legend 250, 257

Kilson, Martin 60, 63 Maghreb 148-9
King, Martin Luther 77, 187, 281 Malcolm X 51, 70, 71, 77, 93, 94, 97,
King, Richard D. 267-8, 283 112, 217, 236, 280, 281, 282
Semoyn 259
Kirlian, Mali 110, 143, 149, 157, 173, 237,
183 238, 250, 269
Ki-Zerbo,Joseph 168,
Knowles-Borishade, Adekotunbo F. Malinowski, Bronislaw 103, 116
246 Mande people 249
Koreans 276 Mandinka people 230
Ku Klux Klan 69 Manning, Kenneth R. 262, 263
Kuhn, Thomas 20 Mantle, L.F.C. 73-4
Kush/Kushites (or ‘Cushites’) 32, 35, Mao/Maoism 27,78, 96, 97
36, 37, 40, 42, 48, 141, 143, 144, Maori people 98, 252
190, 286 Marable, Manning 3, 8-9, 59, 94, 98,
Kush, Indus Khamit 253 281
Marranos 276
Lambropoulos, Vassilis 198, 203 Marshall, Paule 106
Leadbeater, C.W. 69 Martin, Tony 10, 33, 204, 218,
League of Struggle for Negro Rights 277-8, 2°79, 283
90 Marx, Karl/Marxism 20, 25, 26, 38,
Leakey, Richard 29, 273 56, 78, 82, 84, 88, 90, 96, 97, 117,
Lee, Spike 281, 282 159, 160, 164, 166, 167, 176, 180,
Lefkowitz, Mary 9-11, 15, 72, 135, 182, 236, 239, 243, 254
193, 204, 210, 243 Masai people 148
Lemelle, Sidney J. 236-7 Masolo, D. A.
158, 160, 161, 186, 261
Lenin, V.L, Leninism 78, 96, 97, 164 Massey, 65, 71, 72, 72, 221,
Gerald

Lepsius, K.R. 138 225, 252, 253, 255, 257, 258

Levine, Molly Myerowitz 193-4, 196, Matthews, Tracye 280
198, 211 Mauny, Raymond 165, 171, 177
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 156 Mauritania 286
Lewis, Robert 35, 37~8, 59
B. Mazrui, Ali 235
S. 158, 261
Liberia 41, 46, 59, 74, 76, 105-6, 185 Mbiti, John
Libya/Libyans 131, 136, 144, 175 Mbochi people and language 179
Lincoln, Abraham 53 M’Bow, Amadou-Mahtar 125
L’Ouverture, Toussaint 39 Mecca 71, 120, 121, 152
Lucas, J. Olumide 120 melanin 2, 222, 223, 253, 256,
‘Lucy’ 29, 31, 254 266-70, 271, 273, 275, 276
Luke, Don 120, 257 Meroc 40, 120, 138, 141, 143-4, 146,
Lumpkin, Beatrice 250, 264 169, 184
Luxor 150 Merriman-Labor, A.B.C. 42
Lynn, Richard 30, 136, 272, 273, 275 Mesopotamia 32, 43, 48, 130, 204,
244
McLaughlin, Andree Nicola 98 Messiha, Khalil 259
MacRitchie, David 252 Mexico 68, 172, 249, 250
 INDEX
334
14
Milton,John 64 NegugiWa Thiong’o
Milwaukee 3 Niebuhr, Barthold 36

Mohammed (Prophet of Islam) 54, Niger—Congo languages 148

138, 172 Nigeria 44, 80, 116, 119-20, 148, 154,

Monomotapa/Munhumutapa 173, 190, 191, 251, 259, 260, 279,

282
kingdom 119, 225
Oscar 196 Nilo-Saharan languages 148
Montelius,
Montellano, Bernard Ortiz de 267, Njia, doctrine of 235
269, 270 Nkrumah, Kwame 77, 93
Moorish Science Temple 49, 70, 72 Noah (Biblical figure) 37, 54, 55,
Moors, Morocco 49, 251, 252 116
Nobles, Wade 265
Morgan, Lewis Henry 168, 175
Morrison, Toni 106 Norris,John 35, 43-4, 63
William

Moses (Biblical figure) 123, 127, Nubia, Nubians 35, 40, 46, 49, 50,
188, 227 105, 120, 125, 130, 131, 134, 136,
5, 6, 55, 58, 105, 138-45, 146, 147, 148, 149, 154,
Moses, WilsonJ.
228 180, 191, 197, 200, 219, 21, 234,
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 280 237-8, 249, 280
W.A. 10, 123 Numa, Frederick 120
Mozart,
Mudimbe, V.Y. 24-5, 111, 160, 161,
183, 200 Obenga, Theophile 135, 179-81,
Muhammad, Elijah 71,72, 94 184, 185, 191, 236, 243
Muhammad, Wali Fard 49 Ogotemmeli 157-8, 269-70
Muhammad, Warith Deen (Wallace) Okafor, Victor 241, 242, 279
71 Okur, Nilgun Anadolu 241
Olela, Henry ix, 67, 181, 186
Muhly, James x

Muntu, of 156 Olmec people 250

concept
Charles 20, 22, 275 Onwuachi, Chike 61
Murray,
Museum of Natural History, New Ouologuem, Yambo 168, 282
York 142, 154
Mussolini, Benito 75, 84, 221, 226 Padmore, George 25,77
Mutwa, Credo 236 Painter, Nell Irvin 61, 62, 64
Mycenaeans 200 Palestine/Palestinians 73, 88, 130,
Myers, Linda James 246 210, 257
Palter, Robert 11, 129, 210, 257
138, 141, 191 Parker, George 48, 57, 65
Wells
Napata
Nation 85, 94,
of Islam 8, 49, 70-71, Patterson, 14, 149, 207
Orlando
95, 108, 135, 226, 227, 275-7 Pearson, Roger 136, 275
Neanderthals 30, 120, 271-2, 273 Pennington, Dorthy 260-61
negritude 24, 25, 26-7, 80, 83, 85, Pennington, James 35, 36, 37, 48
157, 158, 160, 170, 233, 246, 260, Perry, WJ. 57
265 Peters, Erskine 15

Newark, 96 Petrie, W. Flinders 134, 225

NJ
Newton, Huey 78 Phoenicia/ Phoenicians 38, 43, 46,
NewYork 3, 36, 60, 61, 110, 142, 199, 117, 118-19, 191, 194, 195, 197,
217, 221, 222, 228, 240, 253 200, 202, 205, 209, 250
DEX 335

134, 135, 144, 169, 171, 196, 210,

222, 228, 253, 277
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 271
Roosevelt, Theodore 36
Rose, Tricia 282
Rosicrucianism 66, 67
Rushton, Philippe 30, 268, 272, 273

Saakana, Amon Saba 57, 188, 229

Sadi, Abderrahman 46
Sahara 125, 130, 132, 141, 146~7,
148, 149, 150, 151, 168, 174, 183,
220, 286
Said, Edward 4, 12, 112, 209, 235
San peoples 148
Sankore, mosque and ‘university’ of
106, 150
Sarich, Vincent 31

Sartre,Jean-Paul 24, 26, 79, 164

Scarr, Sandra 9

Schiele,Jerome H. 241, 246-7

Schlesinger, Arthur
3, 8, 11, 103, 227
Scholes, Theophilus E.S. 44-5, 75
Scotland/Scots 67, 88, 89, 252, 277
Scythian people 153
Seale, Bobby 78
Segou kingdom 149
Seifert, Charles C. 35
Seligman, 115, 130, 172
C.G.
Senegal 26, 125, 149, 163, 164, 167,
169, 173, 174, 177, 179, 181, 185,
186, 190
Senghor, Leopold Sedar 24, 26-7,
158, 168, 170, 180, 265
Sergi, Guiseppe 32, 34, 46, 56
Sesostris, Pharoah 124, 195, 197
Shakespeare, William 10
Shakur, Sanyika AKA Monster Kody
Scott 96
Shaw, Florence 52
Shaw, Thurstan 182-3
Shinnie, Peter 140, 146, 184
Sierra Leone 26, 41-2, 149
slavery, slave trades 14, 36, 37, 41, 43,
52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 80, 82, 93, 96,
102, 104-5, 109, 116, 119, 126,
 INDEX
336
131, 133, 145, 149-50, 151, 152, Thompson, E.P. 64, 123
101
154, 180, 197, 207, 209, 217, 219, Thompson, Robert Farris 3,
990, 299, 296, 228, 232-3, 241, Thoth (Egyptian god) 67
Thothmes I, Pharoah 45
944-5, 248, 257, 258, 262,
965-6, 266-7, 282, 283, 286 Thucydides 153, 202
Smith, Grafton Elliot 48, 57, 115, 120 Timbuktu 46, 150-52, 154, 155, 238
282 Tolson, Melvin B. 105-6
Snoop Doggy Dogg
Snowden, Frank 11, 57, 134, 206, Towa, Marcien 159, 160, 161
210 Trigger, Bruce G, 138, 142, 143, 251
Truth, Sojourner 110
Socrates 38, 124, 209
Turner, Nat 39, 218
J.A. 279
Sofola,
Tutankhamun, Pharoah 22, 67, 125,
Songhay kingdom 143, 149, 151,
155, 237, 238 273
South Africa 2, 16, 25, 28, 82, 88, 91, Twain, Mark 7

98, 119, 120, 123, 136, 147, 177,

Ughulu, Emmanuel 120
948, 254, 283-4
Wole 14, 243, 282, 283 unanimism 57, 153, 159, 182, 185,
Soyinka,
104, 152, 222, 232, 233, 265
Spain/Spanish 102,
253,277 UNESCO History ofAfrica 125, 165,
48, 123, 133, 136, 173 168, 180, 183-5
Sphinx
Patricia 208~9 United Nations 12, 19
Springborg, Universal
Stalin,J.V./Stalinism 89, 90, 96, 164, Negro Improvement
259 Association 74
Urhobo people 120
Steele, Shelby 196
Stoddard, Lothrop 283
Stone, LF. 91 Vai people and language 46, 185,
Chris 28, 272 191-2
Stringer,
59 Vail, Charles H. 66, 69, 72
Stuckey, Sterling
Sudan 120, 132, 138, 139, 141, 142, Van den Berghe, Pierre 6, 15, 62
143, 144, 149, 151, 154, 219 Van Sertima, Ivan 11, 32, 73, 136,
Sun Ra 63, 64—5, 107 173, 187, 188, 189, 244, 247-51,
Suriname 101-2, 276 253, 255, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262
Sutton, J-E.G. 146 Vansina,Jan 154, 167, 178, 191
Swahili 94, 117, 152, 215, 238, 248 Vikings 120, 250
Emmanuel 65, 123 Volney, Constantin 38, 40, 46, 48, 56,
Swedenborg,
65, 123, 225, 253
Taharka, Pharoah 144
16
Tanzania 29, 81, 259 Waldron, Jeremy
103, 156-7, 158, Walker, Abena 261
Tempels, Placide
160, 161, 172, 175, 236 Walker, Alice 106, 280
Walker, Charles T. 35
Temple University 180, 191, 231,
240-2, 254, 257 Walker, Clarence 15, 85
Earl
Walker, David 24, 36, 278
Terrasson,Jean 72, 142 142
155 Warsaw
Thackeray, William
7, 66, 69 Washington, Booker T. 55, 56, 70,
Theosophism
Thomas. Clarence 281 236, 262
 INDEX 337

Washington, DC 3, 61, 77, 124, 222, Wolof people and

language 163,
226, 261, 263 172, 178-9,
184, 189, 191, 234
Webb, James M. 35 Wolpoff, Milford 28, 30, 34, 272
Weber, Max 26 Woodson, Carter G. 50, 57, 238, 276

Weidenreich, Franz 30, 34 Wright, Richard 112

Wiener, 250, 257
Leo Wuthenau, Alexander von 136, 250
Wellesley College 10, 277
34
Welsing, Frances Cress 218, 221, Yellen,John
Yergan, Max 13
222.3, 22'7, 298, 248, 255, 256,
Yoruba people 40, 104,
111, 115, 116,
261, 266~7, 269, 270, 271, 273,
119, 120, 121, 146, 149, 154, 169,
283, 284, 285
180, 225, 226, 234, 248, 259-60,
West, Cornel 97, 99, 102, 278
262
Wheatley, Phillis 39
196-7
White, Timothy 28, 29
Young, RobertJ.C.
Yurco, Frank 11, 21
Williams, Bruce 140
Williams, Chancellor 11, 51,57, 72, Zachernuk, 119
Philip
133, 147, 148, 150, 151, 218-19, 33, 44, 56, 64, 104,
Zaire/Congo
221, 228, 235, 236, 238, 282 156, 180
Williams, George Washington Ziegler, Dhyana 239, 242-3
40-41, 56 Zimbabwe/Rhodesia 91, 117~19,
Winters, Clyde 206 219, 225
Wiredu, Kwasi 159-60, 161, 249 Zionism 202
Wise, Stephen 226 Zulu people 145, 147, 225, 236