UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER |
(Ann Macy Roth) BUILDING BRIDGES TO AFROCENTRISM:
A LETTER TO MY EGYPTOLOGICAL COLLEAGUES
[The author of this essay retains the copyright. Permission is hereby granted to make copies for personal or classroom use so long as this statement and the name and address of the author are included with each copy. The essay is also available via anonymous ftp or WWW at: ftp://oi.uchicago.edu/pub/papers/AMRoth_Afrocentrism.ascii.txt where it was first publicly posted on 26 January 1995. It has also been submitted for publication in the Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt. Ann Macy Roth Visiting Assistant Professor of Egyptology Howard University amr@cldc.howard.edu
|
"Afrocentric Egyptology," as practiced
today, has an international scholarly literature behind
it. (The movement is, if anything, more prominent
in France than it is here, to judge from the numerous
displays of Afrocentric books and journals I saw in
Paris book shops last summer.) In America, however,
Afrocentric Egyptology is less a scholarly field than
a political and educational movement, aimed at increasing
the self- esteem and confidence of African-Americans
by stressing the achievements of African civilizations,
principally ancient Egypt. As such, it is advocated
in popular books, textbooks, and even educational posters
sponsored by major breweries. It has apparently thus
far enjoyed considerable success in its educational
aims. As a result, it is being taught to students
from grade school through the university level all
over America, and its tenets are frequently cited as
established fact by the media and the educational establishment.
Coming to Howard as part of a tentative Egyptological
experiment, I was amazed at the quantity of Egyptology
that was already being taught, in courses ranging from
drama to mathematics to philosophy. (An Afrocentric
work by Ivan van Sertima on Egypt is included in the
recommended reading for freshman orientation.) The
movement continues to grow in importance and influence,
and, whatever one thinks of its content, it has an
increasing degree of popular acceptance by a large
audience.
This kind of Egyptology has little to do with the
Egyptology that we professional Egyptologists practice,
and many of us currently regard its incursions upon
our field as a nuisance. We see it only when its exponents
ask aggressive and seemingly irrelevant questions in
classes and public lectures, or make extravagant claims
about ancient Egyptian achievements (the harnessing
of electricity, the conquest of large parts of southern
Europe), citing authors of dubious credibility and
outdated theories and translations (often by E. A.
W. Budge). Especially annoying are those who combine
Afrocentrism with the age-old mystical-crackpot approach
to our field, claiming for the Egyptians fantastic
lost skills and secret knowledge. In most cases, our
reaction to Afrocentrism is avoidance: we deal with
the issue by dismissing it as nonsense, by disparaging
the knowledge of its proponents, and by getting back
to "real" Egyptology.
By doing this, however, we are both ignoring a danger
and missing an opportunity. The number of African-
Americans who are taught this material is growing,
and we will increasingly have to deal with its inaccuracies
and exaggerations simply in order to teach our students.
This gap between our field and the Afrocentric version
of it is not going to go away; if we ignore it, it
will surely widen. And by setting ourselves against
the whole phenomenon in an adversarial and often condescending
way, we make it impossible for the responsible educators
involved in the movement (and there are many) to tap
our expertise and improve the accuracy of the materials
they teach.
At the moment, however, we have the opportunity
to narrow the gap by taking a more positive direction.
By granting that an Afrocentric perspective may have something to offer our field, we can exorcise the defensiveness and hostility that is so often engendered by the assertions of Afrocentrists. By making our classes more hospitable to those with Afrocentric views, we take the first steps towards training a new generation of Afrocentric scholars in the traditional methods of our field. They will then be able to correct and improve the argumentation of Afrocentric scholarship so that the content of their movement benefits from traditional Egyptology's decades of research and hard-won conclusions. Afrocentric Egyptology need not necessarily conflict with traditional Egyptology; it seems to me possible to combine the two, to the benefit, perhaps, of both.
First, however, it is necessary for traditional
Egyptologists to understand the underpinnings of Afrocentric
Egyptology. Its contentions, as I have encountered
them, fall under four rough rubrics: (1) that the
ancient Egyptians were black, (2) that ancient Egypt
was superior to other ancient civilizations (especially
that of the ancient Greeks, which is seen to be largely
derivative), (3) that Egyptian culture had tremendous
influence on the later cultures of Africa and Europe,
and (4) that there has been a vast racist conspiracy
to prevent the dissemination of the evidence for these
assertions. Most traditional Egyptologists recognize
these contentions, but do not understand the motives
behind them, and so deal with them in a counter- productive
way. I will address them one by one.
1. The contention that the Ancient Egyptians were Black. Like most of us, it had never occurred to me that the ancient Egyptians were any color in particular. Neither black nor white seemed an appropriate category- -they were simply Egyptian. This view, in fact, is probably the one held by most Egyptians themselves, both ancient and modern. As we know from their observant depictions of foreigners, the ancient Egyptians saw themselves as darker than Asiatics and Libyans, and lighter than the Nubians, and with different facial features and body types than any of these groups. They considered themselves, to quote Goldilocks, "just right." These indigenous categories are the only ones that can be used to talk about race in ancient Egypt without anachronism. Even these distinctions may have represented ethnicity as much as race: once an immigrant began to wear Egyptian dress, he or she was generally represented as Egyptian in color and features. Although there are occasional indications of unusually curly hair, I know of no examples of people with exaggeratedly un-Egyptian facial features, (meaning NEGROID features) such as those represented in battle and tribute scenes, who are represented wearing Egyptian dress, though such people must have existed.
As for indigenous categories in modern Egypt, I
have been told by most of the modern Egyptians with
whom I've discussed the question that, if they had
to use the categories of the modern Western world,
they would describe themselves as white. (There are
some exceptions, but few would describe themselves
as black.) As evidence of this, one can point to the
consternation that was produced in Egypt when it was
announced that the black actor Lou Gosset would portray
President Anwar Sadat in a biographical film. There
exist terms in modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic to
describe skin color, most commonly "white," "wheat-colored," "brown," and "black."
In practice, however, these terms are frequently applied
inaccurately, so that people are (flatteringly) described
as lighter in color than they actually are. The term
"black" is viewed almost as a pejorative,
and is rarely used. This categorization of the modern
population is only partly relevant to the question,
although it contributes to the reluctance of Egyptologists
working in Egypt to describe the ancient Egyptians
as "black."
I have encountered arguments that the ancient Egyptians
were much "blacker" than their modern counterparts,
owing to the influx of Arabs at the time of the conquest,
Caucasian slaves under the Mamlukes, or Turks and French
soldiers during the Ottoman period. However, given
the size of the Egyptian population against these comparatively
minor waves of northern immigrants, as well as the
fact that there was continuous immigration and occasional
forced deportation of both northern and southern populations
into Egypt throughout the pharaonic period, I doubt
that the modern population is significantly darker
or lighter, or more or less "African" than
their ancient counterparts. It should be noted, however,
that we really do not know the answer to this question.
More research on human remains needs to be, and is
being, done.
But what of scientific racial categories? The three
races we learned about in grade school? In talking
to several physical anthropologists, I have learned
that these three races have no clear scientific meaning.
Anthropologists today deal with populations rather
than individuals, and describe ranges of characteristics
that occur within a population as being similar to
or different from the ranges of characteristics of
another population, usually expressing the degree of
affinity with a percentage. There is no gene for blackness
or whiteness, and nothing that can allow a scientist
to assign a human being to one or the other category,
beyond the social definitions of the culture in which
the scientist is a participant. While anthropologists
sometimes describe people in terms of the traditional
three races, this is not a result of applying objective
criteria based on clear biological distinctions, but
is instead a shorthand convenience. Such judgments
work backwards from the social categories to arrive
at an identification that would be recognized by a
member of society. For example, when a forensic anthropologist
gives the race of an unidentified dead body as "white,"
it is simply a prediction that the "missing person" form with which it will be compared probably described
the person that way. Scientific determinations are
thus just as dependent upon social categories as more
impressionistic judgments are.
Even comparative studies can be biased by the assumptions
that underlie them. Some "Eurocentric" criteria
for race acknowledge the wide variety of physical characteristics
found in Europe, and define as "black" only
those populations that differ markedly from all European
populations. As a result, populations that resemble
any European population are excluded from the category
"black." This is often what happens when
scientists are asked about the remains of ancient Egyptians,
some of whom closely resembled southern Europeans.
By this model, only Africans living south of the Sahara
desert, which separates them more markedly from European
gene pools, are defined as "black." The
categorizations arrived at by reversing the same procedure
are equally extreme. If the range of physical types
found in the African population is recognized, and
the designation "white" is restricted to
those populations that have none of the characteristics
that are found in any African populations, many southern
Europeans and much of the population of the Middle
East can be characterized as "black." This
method was at one time adopted by "white"
American schools and clubs, which compared applicants
to the "white" physical types of Northern
Europe, and found that many people of Jewish or Mediterranean
heritage did not measure up. Neither of these ways
of determining "race" can result in a definitive
division between "black" and "white,"
because those are not in fact distinct categories but
a matter of social judgment and perspective. What
is a continuum in nature is split into two groups by
our society. (The terms "African" and "European," although easier to distinguish because of their geographic
basis, are no less subjective and problematic as cultural
categories.)
Race, then, is essentially a social concept, native
to the society in which one lives. It is anachronistic
to argue that the ancient Egyptians belonged to one
race or another based on our own contemporary social
categories, and it is equally unjustifiable to apply
the social categories of modern Egypt or of ancient
Greece or any other society, although all of these
questions are interesting and worthy of study on their
own. The results tell us nothing about Egyptian society,
culture and history, which is after all, what we are
interested in.
This is not, however, what the Afrocentrist Egyptologists
are interested in. They want to show that according
to modern Western categories, the ancient Egyptians
would have been regarded as black. This approach is
not invalidated by the cultural limitations of racial
designations just outlined, because it is an attempt
to combat a distinct modern, Western tradition of racist
argument, a tradition which has the effect of limiting
the aspirations of young African-Americans and deprecating
the achievements of their ancestors. This argument
contends that black peoples (that is, peoples that
we would describe as black) have never achieved, on
their own, a satisfactory civilization, and by extension
can never achieve anything of much value. "Look
at Africa today," argue the adherents of this
notion, ignoring the added burdens imposed by economic
exploitation, cultural imperialism, and a colonial
past on most African nations, and ignoring the African
states which do not appear regularly in the newspapers.
"Look at history," they add, discounting
Egypt as part of the Near East and ignoring (generally
through ignorance) the other great African cultures.
These misconceptions are argued in many parts of
American society. President Richard Nixon was quoted
as making several of these arguments in the recently
released diaries of his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman.
Similar assertions were made occasionally in the more
intemperate discussions of the Los Angeles riots.
And I understand that the Pennsylvania chapters of
the "Klu Klux Klan" give each new member
a leather-bound book with the gilded title Great Achievements
of the Black Race, which is filled entirely with blank
pages. Is it any wonder that the members of this maligned
group want to inscribe on those blank pages the Great
Pyramid and the Sphinx, the gold of Tutankhamun, the
Asiatic conquests of Thutmose III, and the fame and
political acumen of Cleopatra?
At this juncture, however, many Egyptologists miss
the point. "Why not use Nubia?," I have
been asked, "or any of the other great African
civilizations? Why can't they leave Egypt alone?"
The answer is that these other civilizations did not
build pyramids and temples that impressed the classical
writers of Greece and Rome with their power, antiquity,
and wisdom. Nor have most modern Americans and Europeans
heard of the civilizations of Nubia, Axum, Mali, Ife,
Benin, and Zimbabwe. Hannibal is famous enough to
be worth claiming, but few other non-Egyptians are.
The desire to be associated with historical people
who are generally acknowledged to be "great"
by the Western cultural canon accounts for the frequent
and (to Egyptologists) puzzling contention that Cleopatra
was black, despite the fact that she was demonstrably
descended from a family of Macedonian generals and
kings who married their sisters, and therefore had
little claim to either a black or an African origin
(although one of my Classicist colleagues at Howard
tells me that her paternal grandmother is unknown,
and might have been Egyptian). The reason she is identified
as black is that, among modern Americans, she is probably
the best known ancient Egyptian of them all. Shakespeare
and Shaw wrote plays about her, her life has been chronicled
in several popular films, and her name is regularly
invoked in our popular culture to signal the exotic,
the luxurious, and the sexy. In this sense, "Afrocentric" Egyptology is profoundly Eurocentric, and necessarily
so: it plays to the prevalent cultural background of
its intended audience.
If the question of the race of the ancient Egyptians
is entirely subjective and political, then, why does
it bother Egyptologists at all? Why would we rather
the Afrocentrists "used Nubia"? I think
our reasons are largely related to the tenuous place
our field holds in academia. Afrocentrists see Egyptologists
as a strong, academically supported, establishment
force; but despite, and perhaps even partly because
of, the popular fascination with its contents, Egyptology
tends not to be taken quite seriously by people who
study other parts of the ancient world. Already many
noted departments of Near Eastern Studies with extensive
faculty in ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant do not
feel it necessary to teach or support research in Egyptology
at a similar level. We fear, perhaps, that if we endorse
the view that ancient Egypt was a "black civilization," we will further cut ourselves off from our colleagues
who study other civilizations contemporary with ancient
Egypt. At the same time, there is no place for us
in African studies departments, which generally tend
to address questions related to modern history and
current political and social problems. While anthropologists
working in Africa may offer us insights and models,
the methods and concerns of our field require more,
rather than less, contact with scholars studying other
ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. We
have been too isolated for too long as it is.
The politics of the situation, as well as the requirements
of course topics such as archaeology, make it important
for us to deal with the question of the race of the
ancient Egyptians in our university classes. My own
method, developed long before coming to Howard, is
to be very explicit about my own views on the question.
I give a lecture on the land and the people of Egypt,
normally very early in the semester, before the question
is brought up by students, and I try to present the
question neutrally, without defensiveness or antagonism.
I explain the social nature of racial categories,
and the categories used by the Egyptians themselves,
their representation of foreigners, and the frequency
of foreign (Asian and African) immigration to Egypt
in all periods of its history, extending back into
the Paleolithic. Discussions of geography and language
are also useful here. It is also necessary to address
the political question. In doing so, I often make
use of Bruce Williams' observation (which really goes
to the heart of the matter) that few Egyptians, ancient
or modern, would have been able to get a meal at a
white lunch counter in the American South during the
1950s. Some ancient Egyptians undoubtedly looked very
much like some modern African- Americans, and for similar
historical reasons. Very few, if any, of them looked
like me. I also explain the politics of the question
in modern Egypt. Finally, I explain the irrelevance
of the political question to the subject I will be
teaching, a circumstance that allows me to respect
the students' political convictions (which I treat
rather as I might treat a religious conviction), and
should allow them to learn about Egyptian culture in
my class without violating their beliefs. By making
my position clear at the outset, I forestall the Afrocentric
students' speculations and attempts to "trap"
me into committing myself to the exaggeratedly "Eurocentric" views that they might otherwise assume I espouse.
It also reassures students that they can come to me with questions about their Afrocentric readings, or their own Afrocentric questions about course materials; the topic is no longer taboo. It is impossible to build bridges if we discourage discussion. 2. The contention that the Egyptians were the greatest civilization in history. Contrary to the expectation of most Afrocentrists, most Egyptologists are less bothered by the contention that the Egyptians were black than by the exaggerated claims made about the achievements of Egyptian civilization. These claims, including attribution to the Egyptians of great mathematical, scientific, and philosophical sophistication, are often based on misinterpretations or exaggerations of the evidence, and in some cases pure fantasy and wishful thinking. Many of the arguments advanced show a complete ignorance of (or disregard for) the facts of chronology, for example, the contention that the Greeks "stole" their philosophy from the library at Alexandria and then burned it down to cover their theft, or the claim that the architecture of Greek peripteral temples was borrowed from the eastern mamisi at Dendera.
Paradoxically, while it is in the details of this
contention that Egyptologists find the most grounds
for outrage and dismissal of the entire movement, this
is also the area where we can do the most to help the
Afrocentrists move towards a more rigorous and respectable
scholarship. In principle, few Egyptologists would
deny that ancient Egypt was a great civilization, and
that the ancient Egyptians achieved wonderful things
and made unique contributions to history and global
culture. It in no way detracts from these contributions
that they had terrible difficulties adding fractions
because of a ludicrously clumsy system of notation,
or that they did not understand the importance of the
brain, or that they may have borrowed the idea of writing
from Sumerian civilization. On these points the Afrocentrists
need to develop a better appreciation of where the
strengths of Egyptian civilization really were. Most
Afrocentrists do not want to be in the position of
teaching their children things that aren't true.
However, because of the political desire to find great Egyptian achievements in areas that the West values, and because of the limited material available to them and their limited familiarity with the culture, they often misinterpret the evidence and seize upon unsubstantiated ideas that fit their agenda. The way we can help here is not, however, to argue against these misunderstandings and mistaken ideas individually. There are too many of them, and the arguments tend to be both unpleasantly adversarial and futile."See, this is a model of an ancient Egyptian glider- plane." "Actually, it's a Late Period model of a bird. If the Egyptians could fly gliders at that period, don't you think Greek and Egyptian sources would have mentioned it?" "But it's aerodynamically perfect!" "Well, of course it is; it's a bird." "But it's different from all the other bird models. Besides, what do you know about aerodynamics?"
This sort of argument gets us nowhere. The only
strategy that is effective is more fundamental. We
must familiarize students with the evidence and the
way one argues from it. Students who have read translations
of ancient Egyptian literature and other texts and
discussed how social and cultural deductions can be
drawn from primary sources will generally not stand
for assertions about ancient Egypt that are blatantly
contradicted in these texts. Likewise students who
have read about the forms of pyramids and the theories
about their construction, or who have become familiar
with Egyptian tomb iconography, will not believe claims
that do not correspond to the evidence they have seen.
(There will, of course, be ideologues who will hold
on to their groundless convictions in the teeth of
the evidence, but most of them will have dropped the
class after the initial discussion of the race of the
ancient Egyptians.) Teaching students a more source-based,
critical approach not only will improve their ability
to evaluate the contentions of Afrocentric Egyptology,
but should help them deal with other subjects as well,
and lays the foundation for academic and other work
that will give them pride in their own achievements
as well as their heritage. Moreover, an explicitly
source-based approach has the added advantage of forcing
us to reexamine our own basic assumptions.
When Afrocentrists base their conclusions on the
evidence, the results can serve their purposes without
violating the sensibilities of scholars. The validity
of the evidence also lends authority to the ideological
position being argued. One example that goes some
distance towards this goal is an Afrocentric poster
given me by one of my students, designed and produced
by a group called the Melanin Sisters, for grade-school
children. The poster is decorated with hieroglyphs
and urges the reader to adopt behavior in accordance
with the ancient Egyptian concept of Ma'at. As a guide
to the requirements, the Negative Confession is quoted
(albeit with some substitutions for the weird bits).
Another student showed me a book called Hip-Hop and
Maat, which again uses the Negative Confession, as
well as selections from Egyptian wisdom literature,
to construct a system of morality that the author contrasts
favorably with the street ethics prevalent among many
young African-Americans. (Unfortunately, I did not
make a note of the bibliographic information, and I've
been unable to find the book again.) The use of actual
Egyptian evidence in developing Afrocentric materials
could be encouraged and made more authentic if Egyptologists
took a less adversarial attitude toward its creators.
If we teach Afrocentric students to find evidence for their assertions and to construct convincing arguments, there will always be the possibility that they will use these tools to argue points that we find uncongenial to our pictures of Egyptian civilization. At a conference some years ago, I praised an innovative and provoking argument to a colleague, and his reply was, "Yes, I suppose it was interesting, but just imagine what they will do with it." To use such fears of exaggeration in the popular sphere (regardless of whether they are justified) as an excuse for suppressing arguments that contradict our own reconstruction of the past is unjustifiable and unscholarly. Political bias is unavoidable, so the current wisdom goes, and we all find it more difficult to accept some arguments than others, depending upon our own previous ideas or our feelings about the person making the argument. But such predispositions are something that we all deal with frequently, and should have learned to set aside. We are scholars, and we should not be afraid of the truth, whatever it turns out to be. 3. The contention that Egyptian civilization had extensive influence on Europe and Africa. This argument really has two parts, which are in some ways symmetrical, but which have two entirely different motivations.
The argument for Egyptian influence in Europe is an
extension of the argument for the overall superiority
of Egypt to other cultures: by rooting Greek and Roman
civilizations in Egypt, Africa can be seen as the source
of the civilization we find most impressive: our own.
The argument for the influence of Egypt on other African
civilizations, in contrast, is intended to allow modern
African- Americans (who are in most cases the descendants
of people abducted from non- Egyptian parts of Africa)
to claim the Egyptian cultural heritage as their own.
The half of this question that has been most discussed
of late is the claim that Egypt colonized Greece, and
that classical Greek culture is essentially Egyptian.
Greece is traditionally viewed by Western culture as
the source of beauty and reason, so (again, for political
reasons) it is felt especially important to show that
ancient Egypt was extremely influential in its development.
Black Athena, Martin Bernal's work on the question,
has been at the center of the recent debate on this
claim, and has given it a degree of prominence and
respectability in the non- Afrocentric scholarly community.
Despite this, I feel strongly that Bernal's books do
an ultimate disservice to the cause he is trying to
advance. In the short term, of course, they have brought
both the issue and Bernal himself to the forefront
of public consciousness. However, his arguments are
so chosen and presented that they cannot serve as a
solid foundation for the academically credible Afrocentric
Egyptology that he hopes to create.
In many cases, Bernal has either intentionally misled
his readers by his selection of evidence or he has
neglected to investigate the full context of the evidence
on which he builds his arguments. He routinely cites
late Classical traditions that support his argument,
and ignores the Egyptian evidence that doesn't. A
good example of these problems is his discussion of
the connections of Egypt with bull cults on Crete (vol.
II, pp. 22-25, and more fully as Chapter IV, especially
pp. 166- 184). After an initial foray proposing dubious
connections between Min, bulls, Pan, and the Minoan
king Minos, Bernal connects Minos to Menes and the
name of Memphis, Mn-nfr, because of their phonetic
similarity and their connection with the bull cult
of Apis. (Mn-nfr, of course, comes from the name of
the mortuary temple of Pepi I and has nothing to do
with Menes, who is called the founder of the Apis cult
only by a late Roman writer.) The name of the Mnevis
bull also contains the magic letters mn in the Classical
sources. The fact that the name was consistently written
Mr-wr by the Egyptians is not mentioned in the summary,
while in the fuller argument it is dismissed as "confusion
among the three biconsonantals mr, mn and nm"
in words referring to cattle (possibly due to onomatopoeia).
The fact remains that the Mnevis bull is only rarely
called anything but Mr- wr. The "winding wall"
sign in Mr-wr, which is also used in mrrt, "street," is connected in his summary with the labyrinth of the
Minotaur.
The result of these arguments is a "triple
parallel": the connection of a bull cult in both
Egypt and Crete "with the name Mn, the founding
pharaoh, and a winding wall." But in Egypt neither
the name Mn nor the founding king was clearly connected
to the Apis cult; and the connection of the "winding
wall" sign with the Mnevis bull was probably purely
phonetic. The triple parallel reduces to a single
coincidence: the founding king of Egypt and the most
famous king of the Minoans both had names with the
consonants "Mn." This relationship, as Bernal
points out, has been discussed by previous scholars.
That both countries had bull cults, like most other
ancient Mediterranean cultures, is hardly worthy of
remark. The following discussion of "the bull
Montu" is even more tenuous, since Montu is generally
characterized as a falcon, and is no more to be equated
with the Buchis bull with which he shares a cult place
than the sun god Re is to be equated with the Mnevis
bull. That these arguments are flawed does not prove
Bernal's conclusions wrong, of course; but such arguments
can never prove him right, and in the meantime they
obscure the debate.
The connections and contacts between Egypt and the
Greek world have long been recognized, and Bernal misrepresents
the degree to which modern scholars suppress evidence
for them. Certainly the influence of Egyptian statuary
on Archaic Greek kouroi is widely accepted, among Classicists
as well as Egyptologists, although the differences
in their function and execution are obviously of importance
too. In arguing for an Egyptian colonization of Greece,
however, Bernal and his followers disregard the extensive
Egyptian textual tradition (surely if Thutmose III
had conquered southern Europe and set up colonies there
he would have mentioned it in his annals, for example),
as well as the arguments of the scholars who have been
investigating these questions for decades. Most of
Bernal's arguments, interestingly, rest on the Greek
textual tradition, which was of course a product of
its culture's own cultural and political situation
and requirements, and often made use of the Egyptians'
antiquity and reputation for wisdom. By crediting
the Greek evidence over the Egyptian, European over
the African, Bernal takes advantage of the fact that
his Western audience is more familiar with (and more
inclined to credit) the Classical tradition than the
Egyptian. That few of the myriad reviews of the series
have been written by Egyptologists is an obvious indication
of the European provenience of his evidence.
If we are honest, most Egyptologists would admit that we would like nothing better than to find indisputable evidence that all Western culture derived from Egypt; such a discovery would make us far more important, more powerful, and wealthier than we are today. Because of this bias, we are justifiably cautious in making such claims. The other half of this contention, that Egyptian civilization had a wide influence in the rest of Africa, is argued most prominently in the writings of Sheikh Anta Diop. Many turn-of-the-century scholars made such a claim, and they are widely and reverently quoted in the Afrocentric literature to support the more recent contentions. Interestingly, their motivation was essentially racist. The invention of the "Hamitic" racial group, defined as a population essentially "white" in skeletal features, but with the peculiar anomaly of dark skin, allowed some early Egyptologists to categorize the Egyptians and the Nubians as "white."
Then, working on the racist assumption that "blacks" were incapable of higher civilization, they attributed anything that looked like civilization in the remainder of Africa to "ancient Egyptian colonization." While there is a rather pleasant poetic justice in the fact that the flawed conclusions resulting from these racist assumptions are currently being used to argue for the connection of all Africans and African culture with the glories of ancient Egypt, the evidence for these conclusions is hardly acceptable from a scholarly point of view. As with the European conquests and colonies hypothesized by Bernal, African conquests and colonies beyond Upper Nubia are unlikely because of the silence of the Egyptian records, although other kinds of contact are not impossible.
These two contentions of Egyptian influence outside
of Egypt are among the most difficult Afrocentric claims
to deal with. Unlike the question of race, these are
not subjective judgments, and yet like the question
of race they are yes-no questions that lie at the heart
of the Afrocentric hypothesis. In particular, to deny
the claim that all Africans are descended culturally
and genetically from the ancient Egyptians is seen
as an attack on African- Americans' right to claim
the ancient Egyptian heritage as their own. At the
moment, these claims have neither been definitively
proved nor disproved, so it is probably wisest to take
an agnostic position regarding them. The nature and
extent of Mediterranean connections with ancient Egypt
are worthy of further study, and may offer scope to
arguments more truly Afrocentric than those propounded
by Bernal. In Africa, too, there clearly were connections
of some kind with areas beyond Nubia, as we know from
the depiction of trade goods; and the degree of contact
with Western Africa through Libya and the Oases has
not been exhaustively studied. All of these areas
have been receiving more attention in recent years,
and it may be that there was more contact between Egypt
and the rest of Africa, or between Egypt and Europe,
than our current interpretations allow.
If there was,
let those who would argue it argue from evidence rather
than authority. 4. There has been a scholarly conspiracy among
Eurocentric Egyptologists to suppress evidence about
the blackness of the ancient Egyptians, their greatness,
and their influence on European and other African civilizations.
This is probably the most offensive manifestation of
Afrocentrism we encounter, implying as it does that
Egyptologists as a group have routinely abandoned their
scholarly integrity, simply in order to further some
racist agenda. (As an epigrapher, I find the charge
that we have recarved the faces of Egyptians represented
in tomb reliefs particularly ludicrous.) Its most
frequent manifestation is the Napoleon-knocked- the-nose-off-the-Sphinx-so-no-
one-would-know-it-was- black contention, a silly argument
that demonstrates the movement's unattractive paranoia.
For the evidence against this, incidentally, I refer
the reader to a fascinating article by Ulrich Haarmann, "Regional Sentiment in Medieval Islamic Egypt,"
BSOAS 43 (1980) 55-66, which records that, according
to Makrizi, Rashidi, and other medieval Arab authors,
the face of the Sphinx was mutilated in 1378 A.D. (708
A.H.) by Mohammed Sa'im al-Dahr, whom Haarmann describes
as "a fanatical sufi of the oldest and most highly
respected sufi convent of Cairo."
Although some Afrocentrists may have found individual
Egyptologists uncooperative, for reasons made clear
above, we are hardly likely to deny the achievements
of the Egyptians. In one sense, we are far more Afrocentric
than the Afrocentrists, since we try, where possible,
to study Egyptian civilization on its own terms, rather
than comparing it to our own culture. Most of us have
developed a great respect for the skills of the Egyptians:
their abilities and sophistication as sculptors, writers,
diplomats, theologians, painters, architects, potters,
bureaucrats, builders, warriors, and traders will not
be denied by those who have studied the results of
their work. Even greater skill is apparent in the
suitability of these achievements to the needs of the
ancient culture as a whole, and this suitability is
better appreciated the better one understands the cultural
context in which the achievement occurred. To yank
a building or a statue or a poem from its indigenous
cultural milieu in order to compare it with its Western
counterparts is decidedly Eurocentric, especially when
one uses the Western products as the standard against
which the Egyptian are to be judged; and yet, for political
reasons, this is the most common approach of the Afrocentrists.
In another sense, however, the contention that Egyptologists
are Eurocentric has at its center a kernel of truth.
Any Egyptologist who proposes to do something constructive
about the Afrocentric movement must admit that, in
its origins and to some extent in its current preoccupations,
Egyptology is a Eurocentric profession. It was founded
by European and American scholars whose primary interest
was in confirming the Classical sources and in confirming
and explicating the Old and New Testaments for the
furtherance of Christianity. A look at the earliest
Egypt Exploration Society publications illustrates
the way that early scholars "sold" their
work by connecting it to familiar Classical and (especially)
Biblical names and places: The Store City of Pithom
and the Route of the Exodus (1885), Tanis (1885), Naukratis
(1886 and 1888), The Shrine of Saft el Henneh and the
Land of Goshen (1887), The City of Onias and the Mound
of the Jew (1890), and Bubastis (1890). Furthermore,
the fact that the cultures to the north and east of
Egypt provide texts that we can use to correct and
augment the Egyptian evidence, while those to the south
and west do not, provides a third reason for concentrating
our research on foreign relations to the northeast.
Insofar as Nubian cultures have been studied, they
have until recently been seen as distorted and somewhat
comical attempts to replicate their great neighbor
to the north. Because of these circumstances (the
Classical focus of Western culture, Christianity, and
the distribution of writing), as well as the often
unconscious racism of early scholars which has affected
the shape of our field, Egyptologists have too often
ignored the rest of Africa.
This ignorance has not been complete. As a result of the birth of cultural anthropology around the turn of the century, there was a great interest in finding the origin of Egyptian traditions in those of "other primitive cultures," i.e., the societies of contemporary Africa, which were taken as models for what Egypt was like "before civilization." This rather weird perspective led to such anachronisms as the claim that the ancient Egyptian jubilee ceremony "derived" from the alleged eighteenth- century African practice of killing a king who became too old to rule effectively.
Despite the nature of the underlying assumptions,
this early work in anthropological comparisons contains
many interesting ideas. (I have found the work of
A. Blackman especially rich.) Such similarities between
cultures, reviewed and reworked to accord with current
scholarly standards, may help explicate some of the
puzzling elements in Egyptian culture. It must be
remembered, however, that similarity does not prove
influence, or even contact. As the archaeology and
cultural anthropology of Africa becomes better known,
and as Egyptologists, Afrocentric and traditional,
become more familiar with and sophisticated about African
cultures, it may be that patterns of such similarities
can be identified, categorized, and traced with sufficient
scholarly rigor to show routes of contact. These are
important questions, and represent an area where the
Afrocentric perspective might make substantial contributions
not just to the education and self-esteem of African-Americans
but to the international scholarly field of Egyptology
as well. Such discoveries would add immeasurably to
the resources of the entire field of Egyptology, widening
our horizons and broadening our understanding of Egyptian
culture.
Afrocentric Egyptology, properly pursued, has the potential to achieve important political goals: improving the self-image of young African-Americans and enhancing their belief in their own potential for achievement, by combating the racist argument that no one from Africa or with a dark skin has ever achieved anything worthwhile. The less exaggerated and the more rooted in accepted scholarly argument its teachings are, the more authority the curriculum will have. As the movement grows more sophisticated and better grounded, and as mainstream Egyptologists grow commensurately more accepting of its perspectives, it will, I hope, be possible to do away with the defensiveness that so often characterizes Afrocentric teachings currently. Instead of learning a doctrine on faith, teachers of Afrocentrism should encourage students to investigate the primary evidence and refine our knowledge of Egypt and other African civilizations on their own, truly Afrocentric, terms. Teachers should not worry that students will find that ancient Egypt was not a great civilization after all--on the contrary, the deeper one goes into its cultural productions, the more one comes to appreciate the ingenuity of the Egyptians.
At the same time, Afrocentric scholars with traditional
training can serve as a useful corrective to the European
vantage point inherent in traditional Egyptology, by
focusing on questions that it might not occur to traditional
Egyptologists to ask. We all ought to help train these
scholars. The level of interest and enthusiasm about
ancient Egyptian culture is amazingly high in the African-American
community. When I first arrived at Howard University,
I was stunned by the enthusiasm I met with, both from
my own students and from students outside of my classes
(not to mention the prevalence of Egyptian- themed
clothing and jewelry). At Howard, Egyptology is not
a peripheral field in which one might take an elective
as a novelty or to add an exotic line to one's law
school application--Egyptian culture is seen as a heritage
to be proud of, and something worth learning more about.
Whether or not one agrees with the premise that inspires
this enthusiasm (and, as I've said, this is largely
a matter of faith and definition), there is a real
potential for the expansion of our field among these
students. While some Afrocentric students will lose
interest once they get past the political questions,
others will remain fascinated by the culture. A few
of these may go on to become Egyptologists, whether
with an Afrocentric agenda or not. Others will enter
other professions, enriched by an appreciation for
a culture other than their own, but to which they feel
some connection.
In a time when university administrators talk endlessly
of bottom lines and judge the validity of scholarly
fields by the number of students they attract, we cannot
afford as a field to ignore such an audience for the
material we want to teach. In view of the growing
influence of Afrocentrism in the educational and larger
community, we cannot afford to maintain our adversarial
attitude towards it and to refuse to contribute to
its better grounding in Egyptological evidence and
research. Most importantly, as scholars and teachers,
we cannot afford to ignore enthusiastic, talented students
with new perspectives that have the potential to expand
both our academic field and our understanding of ancient
Egypt.
Lupita Nyong’o’s Children’s Book ‘Sulwe’ To Become Animated Musical On Netflix. The Oscar winner said the story is “a mirror for dark-skinned children to see themselves, a window for those who may not be familiar with colorism.” Lupita Nyong’o’s 2019 New York Times bestselling children’s book about colorism and self-love, “Sulwe,” will be adapted as an animated musical on Netflix, the streaming service announced Thursday.
“Sulwe,” written by Nyong’o and illustrated by Vashti Harrison, centers around a young girl whose complexion is darker than that of everyone in her family. The book demonstrates the effects colorism has on dark-skinned girls and follows Sulwe’s journey to realizing both her outer and inner beauty. The Oscar-winning actor, who has often been outspoken about colorism and how it’s rooted in racism and white supremacy, said in a statement on Thursday that the story of Sulwe is close to her heart.
“I remember seeing a commercial where a woman goes for an interview and doesn’t get the job. Then she puts a cream on her face to lighten her skin, and she gets the job! This is the message: that dark skin is unacceptable,” Nyong’o said. The “Us” actor also said in that interview that “European standards of beauty are something that plague the entire world,” noting that Africa was not exempt from dealing with those long-standing societal issues.
Hence our problem with Black Universities - the expected repositories of Black Knowledge and History. There are 101 HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), the first was founded in 1837, including both public and private institutions (of 121 institutions that existed during the 1930s). Of these remaining HBCU institutions, 27 offer doctoral programs, 52 offer master's programs, 83 offer bachelor's degree programs, and 38 offer associate degrees. Yet only 9% of Black students chose to attend these schools - for good reasons, if they can't keep our history, what good are they? Do you think that Lupita would have hated her Black skin if she had been educated to what White Skin really was, and what it signified?
Click for Realhistoryww Home Page |