Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism
in Ancient History
by Cliff Conner
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.
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