|
The text below is by Cliff Conner, and
is available in pamphlet form from Socialist Action Book for $2.50 by
writing to 298 Valencia St., San Francisco CA 94103.
The use of the word “history” in the title of this talk
may be a little misleading, because the place and period of time that I am
going to focus on are almost outside the area historians deal with. History, as a field of study, is based
on written evidence—written documents—and a great deal of my subject
tonight has to do with an argument over events involving preliterate
people—events that either did or did not occur so long ago that no written
documentation exists to corroborate them.
Furthermore, the idea of “race” figures very prominently
in this discussion, but it is clear that for the people of the period I am
going to be talking about, the whole idea of “race” had no meaning
whatsoever. The concept of
race—that the human family is divided up into distinct groups with
significantly different innate characteristics that are somehow correlated
with skin color—is a relatively modern notion, no more than a few hundred
years old at most. The people of
the ancient world certainly had their share of prejudices and biases
against foreigners and people who were different from themselves, but there
is no evidence that their fears and hatreds were based on skin color, or
that anything like the ideology of racism existed, until after the
trans-Atlantic slave trade really got under way in the sixteenth century
AD.
So insofar as I’ll be talking about race and history, it
is important to stress that the two things are not directly connected in
time. The history will have to do with people and events
three to five thousand years ago, while the “race” part of it has to do
with us, today. And that suggests a
reason why this discussion might be of interest to a gathering such as this
one. As socialists and political
activists, our interest in history is not antiquarian; we study history as
a means of finding a “usable past”—that is, as a means of throwing some
light on current political problems as a first step, hopefully, toward
being able to do something about them.
So it is present-day questions of race here in the
United States that provide the motivation and the primary context of this
discussion today, even though the subject matter is ancient Egyptians,
Greeks, and Phoenicians.
You may not have given much thought lately to the
history of Bronze Age Greece, but if you think it is an arcane subject of
interest only to ivory-tower scholars, you would have been surprised if
you’d gone to a public forum on the subject held by radio station WBAI in
New York a few months ago [March 29, 1996]. It attracted an overflow audience of several hundred people,
at least 90% of whom were African-American, and most of whom were young,
and it was clear that their interest in the topic was far from casual. There is a passionate concern among
young African-Americans with certain aspects of ancient history, and I’ve
seen that reflected among my own students, which is the way I found out
about it in the first place.
Malcolm X often charged that the American educational
system had robbed Black people of their history—of their “usable
past.” Addressing a Black audience,
he said:
“When we send our children to school in this country,
they learn nothing about us other than that we used to be cotton
pickers. Every little child going
to school thinks his grandfather was a cotton picker. Why, your grandfather . . . was some of
the greatest Black people who walked on this earth. It was your grandfather’s hands who
forged civilization and it was your grandmother’s hands who rocked the
cradle of civilization . . . .
“Our history and our culture were completely destroyed
when we were forcibly brought to America in chains. And now it is important for us to know
that our history did not begin with slavery. We came from Africa, a great continent, wherein live a proud
and varied people, a land which . . . was the cradle of civilization. Our culture and our history are as old
as man himself and yet we know almost nothing about it.”
The slaveowners’ society, Malcolm X said, created a
racist ideology that included the proposition that Black Africans—the
population of the African continent that lived south of the Sahara
Desert—really had no history—at least, no history worth studying or
discussing. According to that point
of view, sub-Saharan societies were so primitive, so backward, that they were
virtually timeless, that they hadn’t changed in thousands of years, and to
say that they hadn’t changed is the
same as saying that they have no history.
It also says that Black Africa did not participate in
the major process that occurred in all other parts of the world called
“civilization.” If that were true,
then the rise of civilized societies, which is to say the beginning of
history, took place in the Middle East, in India, in China, in the
Americas, and in the northeastern corner of the African continent, but not
in sub-Saharan Africa. And if that
were the case, then Black Africans made no contributions to the development
of human civilization; Black Africans were uncivilized until whites brought
civilization to them from the outside.
I think it is pretty clear that Malcolm X had a valid
complaint. It may not be that
American schools today explicitly teach that Africa has no history, and
that Black Africans made no contributions to the origin of civilization,
but the educational system certainly doesn’t go out of its way to correct these
common misconceptions that have been passed down from generation to
generation as a legacy of the slaveowners’ ideology. European societies that carried out the
slave trade had a double interest in promoting those ideas. On the one hand, they wanted to justify
what they were doing by pretending they were doing the Africans a favor by
bringing them civilization and Christianity, so they’d be able to get into
heaven. Secondly, they wanted the
Africans themselves to believe they had no worthwhile history, as a means
of demoralizing them—the easier to keep them enslaved. These ideas were like mental chains,
designed to convince them of their “natural inferiority.” To quote Malcolm X once again:
“It is no accident that such a high state of culture
existed in Africa and you and I know nothing about it. Why, the man knew that as long as you
and I thought we were somebody, he could never treat us like we were
nobody. So he had to invent a
system that would strip us of everything about us that we could use to
prove we were somebody. And once he
had stripped us of . . . our history . . . he then began to treat us like
an animal, selling us . . . from one owner to another, breeding us like you
breed cattle.”
After the era of slavery ended, the era of European
colonialism was in full flower, so these same ideological propositions
continued to be valuable for Europeans in their imperial mission to
dominate the continent of Africa.
The images of African primitiveness have been drummed
into all of us, Black and white, from our earliest childhood, and no matter
how much evidence we’ve seen to the contrary, there is still that little
nagging voice deep in our brains saying, “maybe it’s true.” And as I said, the American educational
system does very, very little to counteract that.
So it is no wonder that in recent years, as
African-Americans have developed more and more political consciousness
through the civil rights struggle and the Black nationalist movement, that
they’ve begun to reexamine and rethink, and, finally, to challenge, the
outrageously false idea that Africans made no worthwhile contribution to
human history.
It should be noted that this rethinking hasn’t taken
place only among African-Americans, but among Africans as well. One result of the collapse of formal
European colonialism in Africa after World War II was that the newly
independent African nations were able for the first time to establish
universities that weren’t under the direct control of European scholars and
administrators. The European
scholars, whether through arrogance or paternalism, had simply been
uninterested in studying the African past, but there was an immediate
change when Africans themselves gained control of their curriculums and
research programs.
It wasn’t enough, you see, to simply deny the old
negative portrayal of African nonhistory; it was necessary to replace that
old picture by doing historical research that could discover the reality of
the African past. And that is what
the newly independent African scholars set out to do.
What that research has shown I will summarize in two
general propositions: First—that the history of sub-Saharan Africa is, in
its general long-term patterns, very, very similar to the history of the
rest of the world. Second—that
Black Africans did indeed play a significant role in the earliest
development of civilization on this planet. These two propositions are so solidly founded on evidence as
to be virtually unchallengable, and I’ll expand on them separately.
First—on the long-term patterns of African history and
their similarity to the patterns elsewhere: the most important exception to
that rule is the undisputed fact that the human species originated in what
is now sub-Saharan Africa. (There
was no Sahara Desert at the time.)
First of all, the first hominids, the Australopithecines, arose in
Africa several million years ago; then the genus homo arose in Africa several hundred thousand years ago; and
finally, much later, the species homo
sapiens arose in Africa several tens of thousands of years ago. From its African origins, humankind
dispersed throughout the rest of the world. So when the Nation of Islam and other Black nationalists say
that “the original man” was African, they’re absolutely right.
Once the human animal had spread out over the earth,
almost all of its history—the first 99 percent—was a period characterized
by hunting and gathering as a means of survival—or as a means of “making a
living.” That was true of Africa,
Asia, Europe, the Americas—all continents, everywhere. Then, fairly recently in the overall
scope of things, the most revolutionary advance in all of human history
occurred, and that was the “neolithic revolution”—the advent of agriculture
and the domestication of animals.
That revolution occurred independently in several parts of the
world—in southwest Asia, in Egypt, in India, in China, in the Americas . .
. and in Black Africa as well. It
seems to have happened first in southwest Asia, but that is not the
important point—the important point is that it occurred independently in
several areas, including Black Africa.
The advent of agriculture led to other important
developments. The rise of the use
of metals for tools was certainly one of the most important. That, too, occurred independently in
several areas, including Black Africa.
Settling down into permanent settlements and the
population increase made possible by agriculture led to little population
centers growing into big cities, which required the development of complex
social arrangements, such as sophisticated social and legal
structures. All of these things
occurred in Black Africa, just as they did in China, in India, in the
Americas, and elsewhere. And they
all occurred before there was any extensive interchange between sub-Saharan
Africa and other parts of the civilized world. But eventually that interchange began, and Black Africa
became part of what has been called “the intercommunicating zone” that
linked almost all parts of the civilized world by trade, excepting only the
precolumbian Americas.
So that is what is meant by saying that in the broad
patterns of global history, African history is not significantly different
from the general course of human social development everywhere else.
We’ve all heard about the great cities of London and
Paris all our lives, but many people have never heard of Kumbi Saleh. Kumbi Saleh, more than 1,000 years ago,
was a thriving commercial city in West Africa, in the Kingdom of Ghana,
that had a population of 15 to 20 thousand. Neither London nor Paris were anywhere near that size until
hundreds of years later. The
history of Kumbi Saleh, not to mention Gao, Jenne, Timbuktu, Great
Zimbabwe, or any number of other African cities of the past, is enough to
expose the falsity of the commonplace view of Africa as uniformly lacking
in civilization. If you’ve never
heard of Kumbi Saleh before, that is not an indication of its lack of
importance in world history, but a function of our Eurocentric educational
background. That is a rather stark
example of how distorted our educational background has been with regard to
African history in particular.
Speaking of Eurocentrism brings up another recent
political issue in the United States.
There is a new generation of history teachers, many of whom were
deeply influenced by the radicalization of the ’60s, who have been critical
of the old Eurocentric curriculums in the universities and other schools,
and they’ve been trying to change it—the buzzword that has come to be used
to describe their alternative to Eurocentrism is “multiculturalism.” In the history departments, it has taken
the form of a campaign to replace the old “Western Civ” courses with “World
Civ.” This has been a major issue
on many campuses, where students have passionately protested against being
taught only about the words and deeds of what they call “DWEMs”— dead white European males.
Of course, there has been a conservative reaction to all
of this, as you’d expect. Many
academics have invested their whole careers in traditional Eurocentric
studies, and they don’t want to have to learn a lot of new things now, or
face the possibility that what they’ve previously taught was false, so they
defend the traditional curriculum.
And they get a lot of support from conservative political forces.
For example, in 1994 an officially appointed
presidential panel of historians developed and released a new set of
proposed curriculum guidelines for teaching history in American
schools. These new guidelines
represented a significant move toward multiculturalism and away from the
old Eurocentric model. The
rightwingers put up a huge hue and cry about the erosion of traditional
values and patriotism and everything else.
What they were most upset about was that the new guidelines told the
story of European expansionism not only from the European point of view,
but also from the perspective of the victims of European expansion,
beginning with native Americans’ perceptions of Columbus. Rather than presenting Columbus as a
great culture hero, it showed another face as well—the face of the
oppressor.
The reactionary campaign against the guidelines led to a
vote in the U.S. Senate that
condemned them by a vote of 99 to 1.
So, although historians themselves have, in the majority, moved beyond
the old Eurocentrism, those who politically control the shaping of American
education clearly have not.
The extension of Eurocentrism into ancient history would
be laughable if it hadn’t had such a seriously damaging impact on the
education of many generations of students.
The idea itself is simply ludicrous. Europe wasn’t the center of anything until fairly
recently.
Leaving aside the classical civilizations of Greece and
Rome, which we’ll discuss in more detail in a few minutes, Europe was among
the least civilized, most backward parts of the world until just a few
hundred years ago. And the Greeks
and Romans were relative latecomers themselves. Major civilizations had existed in Egypt and in Mesopotamia
for at least a thousand years before the first glimmerings of civilization
appeared in Greece. Since the
earliest civilizations developed in northeastern Africa and southwestern
Asia, it is an undeniable fact that the roots of civilization are Afro-Asiatic. If that is the case, then how did the
Eurocentric model of human history get around that obstacle?
There were at least two ways. First of all, there was an attempt to show that the people of
northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia who created the earliest
civilizations were really, in a racial sense, Europeans—that is to say,
white people. For example, one of
the great scholars of ancient Egypt, James H. Breasted, put it this way in a book published in 1926: “The
evolution of civilization has been the achievement of [the] Great White
Race.”
The idea behind that claim is suggested by the use of
the word “Caucasians” to refer to white people. Linguistic evidence indicates that the white people who
populated Europe in historic times originated from some tribes that lived
in the Caucasus mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. These people, who spoke a language that
linguists today call “proto-Indo-European,” spread out from the Caucasus in
prehistoric times and today their language is recognized as the ancestor of
many of the languages spoken in India, Iran, and Europe. Those ancestral people of the Caucasus
are often called “Aryans,” and the whole mystique that was built up around
them was the basis upon which the Nazi ideologues developed their notion of
the “master race.” But for more
than a hundred years before Hitler did so much to discredit the idea,
European academic circles took for granted the proposition that virtually
everything worthwhile in the human past was a product of “Aryan” genius.
Any notion that the ancient Egyptians or Sumerians were
Aryans was disproved when it became clear that their languages were not
members of the Indo-European family.
Even before that, it had been clear from ancient artwork that their
skins were darker than Europeans’ skins; that by modern standards they
would be considered “people of color.”
Some scholars tried to explain that away by the proposition that
these people were really white, but appeared dark because they were exposed
to the sun a lot.
But the most important ploy that nineteenth-century
scholars devised to avoid the undeniable fact that the roots of
civilization are Afro-Asiatic was to minimize the importance of Egyptian
and Sumerian and Semitic contributions and to focus instead almost entirely
on the Greeks. According to this
idea, the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Semites established rather static and
uninteresting cultures, while the really worthwhile developments in the
rise of civilization were the work of the dynamic and sophisticated Greeks,
who were considered to be of Aryan stock because their language is part of
the Indo-European family.
Furthermore—and this is the crucial point—it is claimed that the
Greeks, in developing their culture, did it all on their own, with virtually
no contribution from the earlier Egyptian or Mesopotamian
civilizations. The idea that the
classical Greeks suddenly burst on the scene out of nowhere in the sixth
and fifth centuries bc is
often referred to as the “Greek miracle.”
This, in fact, is still the dominant, orthodox position
in the field of ancient historical studies today, and it is this
proposition that has been the focus of controversy on the part of those who
believe that African contributions to history have been undervalued, or
ignored altogether. This has become
the main bone of contention in a bitter debate that has spilled far beyond
the bounds of academia and, in fact, it was the central question in dispute
at the public forum organized by WBAI that I mentioned earlier.
The school of thought that has raised this controversy
goes by the name of “Afrocentrism,” a label obviously intended to pose a
clearcut alternative to Eurocentrism.
The main proponents of Afrocentrism are Africans and
African-Americans. Some are
scholars in universities, but many are not. Their ideas are for the most part not treated seriously by
the official academic historical profession, but you shouldn’t let that
lead you to jump to the conclusion that what the Afrocentrists have to say
is without value. I think it has a
great deal of value, and that is what I am going to try to demonstrate.
The depth of the controversy over Afrocentrism, and the
breadth of support it has among African-American students, is indicative of
an important truth about American society today—one that came to public
attention most forcefully in the reaction to the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial—and that is the deep
division between the way most Blacks and most whites in this country
perceive the world. Afrocentric
history is a major ideological element in shaping African-American
consciousness today. It is my
contention that the Afrocentrists’ essential claims are historically valid,
but even if they weren’t, they would deserve to be evaluated and considered
seriously.
The Afrocentrists’ main thrust, as I have said, is
against the proposition that the real history of civilization only begins
with the Greeks—that the Greeks were the creators of philosophy, of
science, of politics, of mathematics, of medicine, of theology, of art, of
everything of intellectual value—and that they owed no debt whatsoever to
earlier civilizations—especially not to the Egyptians.
A challenge to this notion was put forward in a small
book in 1954—after World War II and about the time of the beginning of the
Civil Rights movement, it should be noted—by an African-American professor
of Greek named G.G.M. James. His
book was entitled The Stolen Legacy,
and it turned the orthodox position on its head by claiming that the Greeks
did nothing original at all; all of their accomplishments, he maintained,
were simply stolen from the ancient Egyptians. The voluminous works of Aristotle, which form the
underpinning of the European intellectual tradition, were all, according to
Professor James, plagiarized from Egyptian sources. And furthermore, he said, the Egyptians
were Black Africans.
Also in 1954, a scholar in Africa named Cheikh Anta Diop
was publishing some similar claims.
Diop was a prominent physicist from Senegal who also devoted himself
to an extensive study of ancient Egypt.
The work of James, Diop, and later Afrocentrists whom
they inspired tended to be aimed at a popular rather than a scholarly
audience, and the official academic experts on ancient Greece and Egypt for
the most part ignored them, or dismissed their ideas out of hand.
Oddly enough—or maybe it isn’t odd at all, given the
power of institutionalized racism—it took a book by a scholar who was not
an African-American to shake up the academic establishment and make it take
notice. That was Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, the first volume of
which was published in 1987. Black Athena was a bombshell in the
ivory tower. One of its critics
complained that “Black Athena
must be the most discussed book on the ancient history of the eastern
Mediterranean world since the Bible.”
It was a powerful argument in support of the central
Afrocentrist thesis that the Greeks and Romans owed a huge debt to their
African and Asian predecessors. The
title of the book indicates that: If the Greeks got their gods and
goddesses, among other things, from Egyptian sources, and if the Egyptians
were Black, then Athena was indeed Black.
Unable to ignore Black
Athena or to dismiss it out of hand, orthodox classical scholars have
circled the wagons and have subjected it to intense scrutiny and
criticism. One scholar in
particular, Mary Lefkowitz, has devoted a great deal of energy to this
effort. She edited a large collection
of critical articles entitled Black
Athena Revisited and wrote a book of her own, Not Out of Africa: How
Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. (Martin Bernal and Mary Lefkowitz, by
the way, were the featured debaters at the WBAI forum mentioned earlier.)
One charge that Mary Lefkowitz and her cothinkers have
leveled against the Afrocentrists is that their ideas are all motivated by
“politics” and “ideology,” whereas she is only motivated by the
disinterested search for truth. But
you should know that Mary Lefkowitz first got involved in this debate when
the editors of the New Republic,
a conservative magazine, asked her to review Black Athena.
Furthermore, the cover of her book shows a bust of Socrates wearing
a Malcolm X cap—highly politicized imagery. So it is more than a little disingenuous of her to claim that
she and other critics of Afrocentrism have no political agenda. And, as we’ll see, there is a very
substantial ideological component in what they’re saying as well.
There is another important aspect of this debate that
you should know about. As I said,
most Afrocentric literature has been frozen out of the official scholarly
milieu, so it has been aimed primarily at a popular readership. As a result, it has often tended to be
undisciplined, and has exhibited a tendency toward making extreme claims
that are often not supportable. For
example, some Afrocentric authors have claimed that Cleopatra and Socrates
were Blacks, that Aristotle personally looted the library at Alexandria,
and that Napoleon’s army dynamited the nose off the sphinx because it was
an obviously African nose, and Napoleon wanted to destroy the evidence of
its African origins. Also, there is
the notion I mentioned earlier—that the Greeks simply stole everything they
knew from the Egyptians.
While these extreme claims are not really defensible, we
can think of them as cases of bending the stick too far in the opposite
direction. After being written out
of history for so long, it is not surprising that there would be a tendency
for the victims to overcompensate.
But these extreme claims have given the defenders of the orthodox
views an easy target to shoot down.
For example, they show that Aristotle couldn’t possibly have looted
the library at Alexandria because it didn’t exist in his lifetime. But in the process of ridiculing the
extreme claims, they deny the connections between Egypt and Greece
altogether.
What Martin Bernal has done, in Black Athena, is to argue the basic case that Greek culture
didn’t arise out of a vacuum, that it had significant Egyptian and
Phoenician roots, but without making the extreme claims that can be easily
refuted. In spite of that, the
strategy of Mary Lefkowitz’s book Not
Out of Africa is to continue to focus on the extreme claims as a means
of discrediting Afrocentrism in general and, by association, Martin
Bernal’s thesis.
If you don’t know much about this debate but just look
at the surface, it looks like the Afrocentrist argument doesn’t have much
going for it. Most of its defenders
are Black, so they might be suspected of being motivated by an emotional
sort of wishful thinking rather than a genuine concern for historical
truth. On the other side, it seems,
are all the experts—the people with the “real knowledge” about ancient
Greece and Egypt—except for Martin Bernal, but the guardians of orthodoxy
would like to dismiss him as just a maverick, a crank, or, worst of all, an
“amateur.”
I confess that when I began looking into this issue I
fully expected to find that the Afrocentrist case had no basis at all, but
I found, much to my surprise, that they not only have a case, but a rather
strong one—stronger, I believe, than that of the academic experts. First of all, it is important to know
that the Afrocentrists didn’t make up the idea of Egyptian influence on
Greece out of whole cloth—that in fact that was a universally accepted
conclusion until the nineteenth century, when the opposing notion of the
“Greek miracle” began to be promoted by a small but influential group of
German scholars who were then successful in spreading their views to the
academic world as a whole.
Furthermore, it isn’t the Afrocentrists who base their
case on irrational appeals to racial solidarity—it was the nineteenth
century German scholars!
This school of thought got its start at the University of
Göttingen, and from there it spread rapidly throughout Germany, to England,
to France, and to the United States.
The key to understanding their ideas about Greece and Egypt is their
conception of “scientific history.”
They were completely convinced that the primary
scientific principle of historical explanation was race, and they believed
they had discovered the “scientific laws of race.” According to their laws of racial
science, only the white race, the descendants of the Aryans, had the
natural ability to create advanced civilizations. The Black race, they maintained, was at the very bottom of
the racial scale, and had no aptitude for civilization whatsoever.
It is important to understand that these German
scholars, for all of their nineteenth-century glorification of science, and
their constant claim to be purely scientific in their investigation of
history, didn’t think it necessary to present scientific proof that Blacks
were an inferior race. They simply
treated Black inferiority as self-evident.
Any evidence that Black Africans were builders of
civilizations, then, was automatically assumed to be false and had to be
explained away, because it violated the fundamental axiom of Black racial
inferiority. For example, when
German explorers first came upon the impressive ruins of Great Zimbabwe in
1871, at first they believed they’d found King Solomon’s lost mines. Then they attributed what they saw to
other outsiders. The most obvious
explanation—that these sophisticated structures had been built by the
ancestors of the native peoples—was ruled out as ridiculous by the
Europeans because they were convinced that Black Africans were simply
incapable of such achievements.
The scholars at the University of Göttingen saw the
Greeks as the purest of Aryans and therefore as the direct ancestors of the
Germanic peoples. It is important
to remember that this “racial science” was developed in the nineteenth
century, in the age of triumphant European imperialism, and it served as a
very useful ideology to explain the “natural right” of white Europeans to
dominate the other, darker peoples of the world.
“Racial purity” was a very important concept in this
ideological program. The ancient
Greeks were believed to be progressive and creative and dynamic and brilliant
because their blood was pure Aryan.
The ancient Egyptians, by contrast, were perceived as a mongrel race
with a significant admixture of Black blood. From these premises flowed the “scientific” conclusion that
the Egyptians could not have contributed anything of value to Greek
civilization. Again, any evidence
to the contrary was summarily dismissed as impossible because it
contradicted the inviolable axiom of “racial science.”
Another aspect of the thought of those nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century European scholars, closely linked to their racism,
was the rabid antisemitism that characterized the period. The Phoenicians, like the Jews, were a
Semitic people; Hebrew and Phoenician are practically two dialects of the
same language. And the prevailing
ideology of the racial purity of the ancient Greeks ruled out Phoenician
influence as strictly as it did Egyptian influence. It took a great deal of ingenuity to
explain away the undeniable fact that the Greeks adopted the Phoenician
alphabet.
You may wonder whether I am exaggerating this, but I
assure you I am not, and Martin Bernal has documented it fully in Black Athena. These ideas were not some fringe
notions—they were stated nakedly and openly, over and over and over again, by
the leading scientists and scholars of the nineteenth century.
I’ll illustrate this with a few examples. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the center of European science was Paris and its primary
institution was the Parisian Academy of Sciences. Its leading spokesman was Georges Cuvier, the founder of
comparative anatomy and the most prestigious scientist of his day. He considered Black Africans to be “the
most degraded of human races.” This
reflects the common conception of the pre-Darwinian era that the original
human race created by God was pure Caucasian, and that other races
represent degenerate forms. So
Cuvier saw Blacks as the most degenerate of all, and said that their “form
approaches that of the beast and [that their] intelligence is nowhere great
enough to arrive at regular government.”
In what he considered to be a thoroughly scientific
description of “the Negro race,” Cuvier wrote: “The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick
lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it
consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.”
Another big name in the history of nineteenth-century
science was Charles Lyell, who is frequently credited with founding the
modern discipline of geology.
Referring to an African people, Lyell wrote: “The brain of the Bushman . . . leads
towards the brain of the Simiadae [monkeys]. This implies a connection between want of intelligence and
structural assimilation. Each race
of Man has its place, like the inferior animals.”
The most famous of all nineteenth-century scientists, of
course, was Charles Darwin.
Although Darwin was a passionate opponent of slavery, he nonetheless
adhered to a hierarchical conception of human races that placed Black
Africans and Australian aborigines in a position intermediate between
Caucasians and chimpanzees. In his
book The Descent of Man he
identified the dimensions of the gap separating humans from apes as the
distance “between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” Darwin’s best-known scientific
colleague, T.H. Huxley, stated: “No rational man . . . believes that the
average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white
man.”
One of Cuvier’s disciples, Louis Agassiz, emigrated to the
United States in the 1840s and became one of the most prominent and
important American scientists of the day.
Agassiz first encountered people of African descent when he came to
America, and he was horrified by the experience. In 1846 he wrote to his mother back in Europe of his extreme
discomfort in the presence of Black servants, whom he, too, perceived as
members of a “degraded and degenerate race.”
“And when they advanced that hideous hand towards my plate
in order to serve me, I wished I were able to depart in order to eat a
piece of bread elsewhere, rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race—to
have tied their existence so closely with that of negroes in certain
countries! God preserve us from
such a contact!”
His feelings of revulsion toward Blacks led him to the
“scientific” conclusion that Blacks and Caucasians were not simply
different races, but completely separate species. And here is his scientific conclusion regarding Africans and
civilization:
“This compact continent of Africa exhibits a population
which has been in constant intercourse with the white race, which has
enjoyed the benefit of the example of the Egyptian civilization, of the
Phoenician civilization, of the Arab civilization . . . and nevertheless
there has never been a regulated society of black men developed on that
continent. Does not this indicate
in this race a peculiar apathy, a peculiar indifference to the advantages
afforded by civilized society?”
One of Agassiz’s collaborators was Karl Vogt, a
prominent German anatomist and geologist, who, by the way, was the same
“Herr Vogt” who was the target of a famous polemic by Karl Marx. Herr Vogt made this very scientific-sounding
pronouncement in 1864:
“By its rounded apex and less developed posterior lobe
the Negro brain resembles that of our children, and by the protuberance of
the parietal lobe, that of our females. . . . The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual
faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white. .
. . [W]e may boldly assert that the whole race has, neither in the past nor
in the present, performed anything tending to the progress of humanity or
worthy of preservation.”
Another of the most famous scientists of the nineteenth
century was Paul Broca, a professor in the Parisian Faculty of
Medicine. He saw it as his mission
to raise the comparison of human races to a higher scientific level by
means of quantification. If this
were going to be a real science, he believed, it would have to be based on
numbers.
Others before him had attempted to do this by measuring
and comparing the cranial capacity of skulls of various races of
people. Broca followed the same
program, but brought more sophisticated methods and a higher degree of
precision to the measurements.
Anyway, like his predecessors he believed he had developed a purely
objective way to demonstrate the superiority of the Caucasian race and the
inferiority of Black Africans. He
concluded that “there is a remarkable relationship between the development
of intelligence and the volume of the brain.” And he claimed that his research showed that “the brain is
larger,” in general, “in men than in women” and “in superior races than in
inferior races.”
More specifically, he said: “A prognathous face [one
with a protruding jaw], more or less black color of the skin, wooly hair
and intellectual and social inferiority are often associated, while more or
less white skin, straight hair and an orthognathous face [one without a
prominent jaw] are the ordinary equipment of the highest groups in the
human series.” And here is the
bottom line, according to Broca:
“A group with black skin, wooly hair and a prognathous
face has never been able to raise itself spontaneously to civilization.”
So you see, as far as nineteenth-century science was
concerned, the very idea of African civilization was a pure oxymoron. It was impossible. It just couldn’t ever have happened.
A few of Broca’s contemporaries challenged his
pronouncements on Black inferiority, and he responded by accusing them of
allowing their political prejudices about human equality to get in the way
of the objective scientific truth: “The intervention of political and
social considerations has not been less injurious to anthropology than the
religious element.”
If that sounds familiar, it should; it is very much the
same charge that Mary Lefkowitz and her colleagues direct against the
Afrocentrists. In retrospect, of
course, it is clear that it was Broca who was allowing his social
prejudices to lead him to utterly worthless conclusions about brain size,
race, and intelligence. (All of
this has been fully documented by Stephen Jay Gould in his very valuable
book The Mismeasure of Man.)
The main point to be understood from all these
quotations is that this is the context in which you have to evaluate the
scientific methods claimed by nineteenth-century historians of
antiquity. This is what they meant
by “science.” The historians I am
talking about are the scholars who created the modern academic discipline
that Mary Lefkowitz now represents.
You can see why she and her colleagues feel so threatened by the
exposure that Martin Bernal has given to the origins of their field. According to Bernal:
“[The University of] Göttingen, in the period from 1775
to 1800, not only established many of the institutional forms of later
universities, but its professors established much of the institutional
framework within which later research and publication within the new
professional disciplines was carried out. . . . [T]he center of the intellectual ferment was in Classical
Philology, later to be given the more imposing and modern name . . .
‘Science of Antiquity.’”
This German “Science of Antiquity” was “later transposed
to Britain and America as the new discipline of ‘Classics.’” As for the content of this new
scholarship, its “chief unifying principle . . . was ethnicity and racism.”
One University of Göttingen professor, Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach, was the first to produce a scholarly work on the subject of
human racial classification [De
Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, 1775]. He coined the term “Caucasian” in 1795 to refer to the white
race, which he considered to be naturally superior to all others in beauty
and intelligence. He, too, believed
other races to be degenerate forms of the original Caucasian race of
humans.
Another Göttingen professor, Christoph Meiners, played a
major role in the development of the new, allegedly scientific methodology
of history. He insisted that
historical studies should not focus on individuals, but on “peoples,” and
he ranked various peoples on a hierarchical scale, with Germans and Celts
at the top and Hottentots (a Black African people) and chimpanzees on the
bottom.
The first major challenge to the idea that the Greeks
owed a substantial cultural debt to Egypt came from a Göttingen scholar
named Karl Otfried Müller, whom Bernal characterizes as “ahead of his time
in the intensity of his racialism and anti-Semitism.” These and other German scholars,
including Barthold Niebuhr, Christian Gottlob Heyne, Friedrich Schlegel,
and Friedrich August Wolf, were the creators of the doctrine of the “Greek
miracle,” which systematically sought to deny any creative role in the
origins of civilization to the Egyptians and other Africans on the grounds
that they simply didn’t have the necessary mental capacity.
This sort of crude racism is no longer fashionable in
academia. People who make obviously
racist statements today, like Marge Schott, are laughed at as idiots. Nonetheless, the classical scholars
today, in arguing against the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greek civilization, are
defending an orthodoxy that was created on the basis of thoroughly racist
ideological principles.
Academic orthodoxies have a logic and a momentum of
their own. Scholars in the field of
classical studies have a “turf” to defend.
They control the scholarly journals that define the official
positions on the subject of the origins of Greek civilization. If you were a young scholar in that
field and you submitted an article arguing that Egypt had had a significant
influence on Greece, your article would be rejected. And if you can’t get your articles
published, then you won’t be able to get a job in that field. So your career depends on toeing the orthodox line. Only an outsider from another academic
discipline, like Martin Bernal, could have written a book like Black Athena.
Although the defenders of the academic orthodoxy today
don’t use the nineteenth-century racist arguments, there is another aspect
of nineteenth-century ideology that they continue to utilize, and that is
their positivistic claim that their conclusions are based only on solid
facts and on scientific proof.
Those who disagree with them, they say, are “unscientific” types who
deal only in “speculation.” While they continue to cloak themselves in the
prestigious garb of “science” just as their nineteenth-century forebears
did, we have to keep in mind what passed for science in this field in the
nineteenth century.
As for today, to suggest that the dispute over the roots
of ancient Greek civilization can be based entirely on “positive facts” or
“scientific proof” is just pure moonshine.
The “positive facts” don’t exist.
Nobody on either side of this issue has a decisive body of factual
data to prove their case. So, as
Martin Bernal has pointed out, the argument really doesn’t turn on who can
prove their claims, because nobody can, but it is a question of competing
plausibility—which position is more plausible?
First of all, you would think that the least plausible
explanation for anything would be the one that depends on a belief in
miracles. But in spite of that, the
scholars who defend the doctrine of the “Greek miracle” insist that the
burden of proof is on the Afrocentrists.
They say there is no positive proof of Egyptian influence on Greece. What they mean is that there is no
absolutely unambiguous archeological data to prove it.
But that is not the same as saying there is no evidence
to support the Afrocentrists’ claims.
It so happens that there is a great deal of evidence—an overwhelming
amount of evidence—but the classicists refuse to accept it because it
doesn’t qualify, according to their standards, as “positive proof.” It is, they say, analogous to what might
be called “hearsay evidence” or “circumstantial evidence” in a court of
law.
Nonetheless, let us consider this evidence that they
have ruled out of consideration.
Believe it or not, it is the virtually unanimous testimony of the
ancient Greeks themselves! The
ancient Greek authors did not try to deny their debt to the ancient
Egyptians; to the contrary, they wrote about it at great length. Herodotos, the fifth-century bc author who has been called “the
father of history,” acknowledged it; Hippocrates, the so-called “father of
medicine,” acknowledged it; Plato acknowledged it; Aristotle himself
acknowledged it. It was so
commonplace a sentiment that it wasn’t even controversial among the Greeks
and Romans. They took it for
granted that their civilization had been based on the wisdom and
accomplishments of earlier civilizations, and especially that of
Egypt. For thousands of years, this
was assumed to be an accurate assessment—until the nineteenth century, when
the classicists, with their racial science and positivist demands for
absolute proof, decided that the ancient Greeks themselves didn’t know what
they were talking about. The
traditions of Egyptian influence, they said, were simply “myths.”
I’ll be more specific.
First of all, on the origins of Greek religious thought, here is
what Herodotos had to say:
“The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from
Egypt. I know from the enquiries I
have made that they came from abroad, and it seems most likely that they
came from Egypt, for the names of all the gods have been known in Egypt
from the beginning of time . . . These practices, then . . . were borrowed
by the Greeks from Egypt.”
If Herodotos is right about that, then it is certainly
reasonable to suggest that Athena was originally a Black deity—a goddess
created by Black people in their own image.
On the origins of philosophy: According to the testimony
of the ancient Greeks, the first of the famous Greek philosophers, Thales,
spent a lot of time in Egypt studying the ancient learning of the Egyptian
wise men. The orator Isokrates, a
rival of Plato’s, said that Pythagoras went to Egypt and on his return “was
the first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy.”
Pythagoras, of course, is thought of first of all as a
mathematician. What about the
origins of Greek mathematics? Well,
according to no less an authority than Aristotle, “Egypt was the cradle of
mathematics.” Furthermore,
Aristotle credited the Egyptians with the invention of geometry,
arithmetic, and astronomy.
Plato, who was a mathematician as well as a philosopher,
attributed to Egyptian wisdom not only the invention of “numbers and
arithmetic and geometry,” but also the creation of writing, language, and
all of the sciences.
And how about politics?
One of the best-known examples of Greek political thought is Plato’s
Republic. A Greek commentator of the late fourth century
BC, Krantor, reported that “Plato’s contemporaries mocked him, saying that
he was not the inventor of his republic, but that he had copied Egyptian
institutions.” (It is interesting
to note that Karl Marx made the same point in Capital: “Plato’s Republic,”
he wrote, “is merely an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian system of
castes.”)
These quotations don’t prove that ancient Greece learned
its theology, philosophy, mathematics, science, and politics from Egypt,
but they certainly demonstrate that the Greeks themselves thought so. So the Afrocentrists aren’t all alone in
this argument after all—they have the ancient Greeks on their side! How ironic—even Aristotle is among them!
In addition to the many accounts of Greek thinkers who
studied in Egypt or Mesopotamia, there is also the possibility of an even
more fundamental connection between the Greeks and earlier
civilizations. That is the
possibility that during the Bronze Age some three to four thousand years
ago, the already civilized Egyptians and Phoenicians conquered and settled
in parts of Greece, and thereby transmitted elements of their cultures,
which might well have served as the starting point and foundation of Greek
civilization.
That is an interesting conjecture, but how plausible is
it? The orthodox scholars dismiss
it out of hand: “No proof!” they say; “Pure speculation.” But again, this speculation isn’t
something the Afrocentrists made up; it, too, has a solid basis in the
traditions of the ancient Greeks themselves, in Greek mythology. There were numerous myths involving
Egyptians or Phoenicians as colonizers and founders of Greek cities—such as
Kadmos, the legendary colonizer of Thebes; Danaos, colonizer of Argos; and
Kekros, founder of Athens.
Invasions of Greece by Egyptian conquerors in the distant past were
themes of the great Greek dramatists Aischylos and Euripides.
According to the positivist method, all of this is
worthless information because it hasn’t been proved—it is “only myth.” But myths have often been shown to have
a basis in fact. At one time, the
Trojan War and the city of Troy itself were considered to be mythological .
. . until archaeologists discovered the ruins of Troy. The pervasiveness of myths concerning
the Bronze Age colonization of Greece by Egyptians and Phoenicians suggests
that they, too, may well reflect actual historical events.
The Afrocentric position in support of such
colonizations is at least as plausible as their opponents’ invocation of an
unexplicable miracle. There is
archaeological and linguistic evidence supporting the Afrocentric
view—Martin Bernal claims that it is strong and has devoted the whole of
the second volume of Black Athena
to presenting it. The orthodox
scholars claim that Bernal’s evidence is not persuasive. Frankly, I am not qualified to evaluate
these counterclaims.
But in spite of these technical arguments, Martin Bernal
has made some crucial aspects of this debate perfectly clear, and those are
that the issue has never been, and can never be, separated from a social
context of institutionalized racism; that it wasn’t the Afrocentrists who
injected race into the issue; and that the orthodox scholars can no longer
credibly claim that their position is based on a nonideological,
nonpolitical, disinterested search for “truth.”
Another important aspect of this question remains to be
considered. Suppose the ancient
Egyptians did fundamentally contribute to the birth of Greek
civilization. Why should Black
Africans and African-Americans believe that has anything to do with their
ancestry? Were the Egyptians Black?
There are many opinions on that question. On the one hand, the Afrocentrists use
the terms “Egyptian,” “African,” and “Black” interchangeably. On the other hand, the traditional
perception of ancient Egyptians is that they may have been darker-skinned
than the Europeans, but they aren’t usually thought of as Black Africans,
who are to be found south of the Sahara Desert rather than in northern
Africa.
In fact, there is a great deal of solid evidence to
demonstrate that genuinely Black Africans (by anyone’s definition) did play
an important role in ancient Egypt from the very earliest times. Standard textbooks state that the
prehistoric origins of Egyptian civilization came from far south along the
Nile River, which is to say from Nubia and Ethiopia—from the heart of the
African continent. That is not to
say that sub-Saharan-type Black Africans made up all of the Egyptian
population in the age of the Pharoahs, but they did constitute a
significant part of it, and they frequently rose to the top of political
power in Egypt. Statues, wall
paintings, and documents make it clear that there were Black pharaohs, and
that there were periods during which all of Egypt was ruled by the
territories along the southern stretches of the Nile that were populated by
Blacks.
Furthermore, when the Afrocentrists say that all
Egyptians were Black, there is evidence to support that claim. Herodotos traveled extensively in Egypt
in the fifth century BC and he described the Egyptian people as having
black skins and wooly hair. The
classical scholars say that Herodotos’s reports about Egypt are
untrustworthy because he couldn’t speak or read the Egyptian language, and
was therefore unable to critically evaluate the information he was given
there. Even if that were a valid
point, however, it wouldn’t apply in this case, because when Herodotos gave
a physical description of the people in Egypt he was just reporting what he
saw with his own eyes.
But there is still another way that identifying the
Egyptians as Black is credible, and that is in the sense that all Egyptians
could be considered “people of color.”
If you consider the Black population in the United States today, you
see a wide range of skin colors, varying from very light to very dark. The same could be said of the ancient
Egyptian population. In fact,
Malcolm X made a similar point about the modern population of Egypt as he
saw it during a visit there:
“More so than any other city on the African continent,
the people of Cairo look like the American Negroes—in the sense that we
have all complexions, we range in America from the darkest Black to the
lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the same thing; throughout Egypt,
it is the same thing.”
But returning to ancient Egypt, if you define “Black” as
meaning only the very, very dark-skinned people of sub-Saharan Africa, then
you would not agree that all Egyptians in the age of the Pharoahs were
Black. It is, however, undeniable
that Black Africans played the leading role in the development of one of
the first civilizations on earth.
As Martin Bernal puts it: “Egyptian civilization is clearly based on
the rich Pre-dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin
is uncontested.” That alone is certainly
sufficient to refute the “racial science” that claimed that Blacks made no
contribution to the origins of civilization.
So in conclusion, I will say that I find myself in
agreement with Martin Bernal, that the fundamental propositions of the
Afrocentrists are completely plausible—much more plausible than the
competing hypothesis of the “Greek miracle”—and I would expect that future
archaeological and linguistic evidence will tend to confirm them and will
eventually force the classical scholars to rethink and revise their
orthodox positions. Meanwhile,
Africans and African-Americans will have to continue struggling to have
their history accorded the respect it deserves, but they have already done
a great deal to expose the great lie that they are “a people without
history.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOURCES OF
QUOTATIONS: All quotations from
Martin Bernal are from the first volume of Black Athena (Rutgers U., 1987). All quotations from ancient Greeks and from
nineteenth-century classicists are also from the first volume of Black Athena. All but one of the quotations from
nineteenth-century scientists are from Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Norton,
1981); the one exception is a quotation from Cuvier that is from Black Athena. All but one of the quotations from
Malcolm X are from By Any Means
Necessary (Pathfinder, 19__); the one exception is his description of
modern Egyptians, which is from Malcolm
X Speaks (Grove, 1966). The
quotation from James H. Breasted is
from The Conquest of Civilization
(Harper & Brothers, 1926). The
quotation from a critic of Black
Athena is from Black Athena
Revisited (U. of North Carolina, 1996).
DEDICATION:
To Dashiell Porter, a student from whom I learned a
great deal.
|
