contesting-Kemet

There are certain premises and positions that have become untenable by virtue of the Afrocentric intervention into social sciences and humanities. Afrocentrists have opened doors to historical research that have been long held shut by Eurocentric orientations to phenomena. For instance, in ancient historiography few scholars are now willing to take ancient Egypt out of Africa as Hegel, Breasted, and Maspero tried to do in the l9th and early part of the 20th century.[1] No serious researcher would claim, as Toynbee did, that Africa produced no civilizations.[2] Almost no one would argue the positions advanced by Fage concerning African people.[3] While a few whites can still be found who preach the inferiority of Africans, almost no scholar would be foolhardy enough to suggest that whites are biologically superior to blacks. In fact, I have witnessed a remarkable change in attitude on the part of many white scholars who are now following the tradition of Afrocentrists in their examination of phenomena by taking into greater consideration oral traditions, centered analysis, human similarities, and locational analysis, spheres previously examined mainly by Afrocentrists.

My aim is to demonstrate the explanatory power of the Afrocentric paradigm. I do not aim to present a litany of interpretative achievements. I have defined Afrocentricity as a perspective on phenomena that views African people as subjects rather than objects.[4] This means that all analyses of African phenomena must be seen in the light of Africans as actors not mere spectators to Europe. Such a slight alteration in perspective produces new understandings and advancement in science. Afrocentricity is therefore in the perspectivist tradition. Assuming, as I do, that intellectual location is central to interpretation the Afrocentrist seeks to examine phenomena from a particular place. Intellectual location is the psychological and historical space occupied by an observer of phenomena. This space I refer to as place. While it is true that place is significant in such an interpretative design it is not place alone that enables the scholar to make a proper analysis. However, you cannot have an orientation to the facts that leads in the direction of explanation if you are badly located, that is, if you are misplaced. For instance, there was almost no possibility that a white southern medical doctor would adequately and correctly diagnose African patients during slavery. Doctors were poorly placed to draw the proper conclusion from what they saw. In her penetrating Afrocentric study Slavery and Medicine, Katherine Bankole examined slave medicine only to find that the doctors who tended to Africans were often so influenced by the system of white supremacy that they viewed all African illness in the context of white superiority and black inferiority.[5] The assumptions that caused doctors to misdiagnose Africans were based on attitudes about slavery. How could an African want anything other than slavery? Thus, any African who ran away from the plantation had to be suffering from a particularly bad form of drapetomania, the desire to leave forced labor. If the African happened to show a dislike for slavery and the overseer or master of the plantation, he or she was diagnosed as having rascality, a disease of Africans who are irritated by their environment.

A recent African American history book written by a committee for high schools claims that during yhte 1840s the white slaveowners had a problem because so many Africans were running away. There is a problem is such construction from the Afrocentrist’s point of view because it is impossible to accept the marginalizing of Africans. I am particularly radicalized by the authors’ lack of respect for the people who were actually having a problem, the Africans. In another instance we are confronted with the shining models of the American drive for democracy: The Declaration of Independence, the Federalist papers and the Constitutional conventions in Philadelphia. What do we know about the Africans’ response to these instruments of nation-building? Did white historians really care to ask? What were the Africans’ positions on these subjects during the course of debates and conclusions? Why were their voices not recorded in the earlier documents and not discussed in the history books? Did they not have a voice? Does this say something about the white supremacist location of the Founding White Fathers? It is probably more beneficial to look at the white historians’ location for an answer to how they interpreted the Africans’ presence or lack of presence in colonial America. What does it mean that historians have rarely speculated, as Ray Winbush, opined in Black Issues in Higher Education on the nature of the discussions among the servants, horsemen, and cooks who assisted the white conventioneers with personal services during their meetings on the nature of the new government?[6]

What can it mean that a whole generation of European scholars sought, while claiming to be Egyptologists to undermine the African nature of ancient Egypt? While there was some criticism by whites of this project why did not the mass of historians object to the blatant racism in those early formulation of ancient African history? Those early Egyptologists sought to take Egypt out of Africa and black skinned Africans out of Egypt. It was a conspiracy to minimize African’s role in early human civilization. Such a conspiracy could only be carried out because of the near uniform belief among whites in the inferiority of Africans. The Great Enslavement of Africans had seen to it that whites developed and maintained negative attitudes about African history and capability. What purposes and whose interests were served by the steady denial of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians? All one has to do is to examine the record and it will be clear that these scholars present a complex argument against an African Egypt. They do this despite the overwhelming nature of the facts. Location becomes the critical issue, that is, the only interpretative issue.

Let it be clear the question of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians would never have been raised except for the persistent white racism in Western history. It had not been an issue in Europe prior to the 15^th century and only became an issue with the vast discoveries in Egypt during the 19^th century, a most imperialistic century for Europe.

Audrey Smedley has written brilliantly about the origins of racism making the point that the concept of “race” was designed with its ideological fabrications about human differences to be used as a mechanism for maintaining “distant” and “social status place” of various peoples.[7] Race, thus established, became an instrument for determining who should have power, authority, prestige, agency, and independence. It was a status marker, restricting competition while the practitioners of racism argued for competition in a contradictory and hypocritical manner. It is no wonder that the historians born of this context held some of the same beliefs as the masses of whites. They saw Africans as morally, intellectually, physically, and culturally inferior to whites. It is easy to see how people who had devised such elaborate intellectual contortions as race would have a problem believing that “low status” people could have constructed the monuments of ancient Egypt.

Who could these Africans people be who produced the greatest civilization of antiquity? Surely in the minds of the early European scholars there had to be an explanation that showed them to be different from Africans who lived in societies contiguous to Egypt. In the eyes of those whose culture was warped by slave-trading and colonization the ancient Egyptians could not be Africans, after all Europeans were enslaving Africans! If they admitted that the Egyptians were Africans they would have to declare that they were not black. They had to be white Africans! Who during the 19^th century would believe that blacks built the pyramids? What whites of the 19^th century could admit that fact? In a curious ways whites of the 20^th century have argued the same point but with a different twist. They ask, why do Africans want to claim Egypt? Why not claim West Africa? The obvious answer is that both are Africa, but the question itself remains a throw-back to the canard about Egypt not being Africa. Egypt and Nubia impacted on the rest of Africa as thoroughly as China impacted on parts of Asia or Greece impacted on parts of Europe.

Because Europe was working out its own relationship to its past during the last five hundred years, the historians of the West captured the ambiguity present in Europe’s own wrestling with its diversity. When they spoke of Africans they largely defined a narrow idea of a “true Negro” that usually referred to Africans from the rainforest region of the continent that had come to mean for whites, primitive, dangerous, mysterious, and the extreme of themselves physically. To satisfy their stereotypes they took physical characteristics such as the shape of lips, the width of the nose, and the size of genitalia to be definitive statements about the difference between themselves and Africans. Surely the ancient Egyptians could not be Africans. It is as if Africans would say that the only Europeans are the Scandinavians who are extremely pale, with red or blond hair, long noses, and a love of the sea. This was a wicked ideology maintained as science by some of the leading European scholars.

In effect, the ideology of white supremacy was the rocket engine that put into flight the fantastic ideas of a white Egypt, buttressed by one self-serving Egyptologists after another. The Nile Valley civilization arising about 3400 BC in historical terms and ending with the Romans dispossession around 50 BC did not evolve in isolation from the rest of Africa. Egypt was rather clearly an African civilization as connected to Africa’s history and geography as Axum or Nubia.

The fact of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians was accepted in Europe during the Renaissance. Actually prior to 1830 it was generally understood that the ancient Egyptians were black. However, after 1830, that is, after the Champollion’s deciphering of the Medu Netcher and the publication of Dominic Vivant Denon’s Description of Egypt, came the attempt to take Egypt out of Africa. Some authors have argued that the racism that produced this type of negative attitude toward black achievements was born during the slave trade as an attempt to justify morally what whites were doing to Africans physically. Few interpretative histories of European Slave Trade have dealt with the ideology of white supremacy as a generating force for much of the anti-African historiography. [8]

Egypt in the Mind of Modern Europeans

The objections to an Afrocentric historiography of Africa range from the frivolous to the serious. I place those who argue from the old racist paradigm in the category of the frivolous because they seek to argue by dismissal, to refute by ignorance, rather than engage the concrete arguments of the Afrocentric historians. The serious but off-center writers would include Frank Snowden and his folllowers like Frank Yurco. Snowden has become the standard bearer for an out-of-date, off-centeredness that borders on the marginalization of Africans in their own history. They are serious scholars, however, because they engage data but off-center because they assume a European place, a European centrality while discussing Egypt and Nubia. Both civilizations predate Greece and to make them dance around Greece is turning the tables on their heads. Snowden does this in his often cited book, Blacks in Antiquity. As I have often pointed out in discussion, Snowden’s idea is not about Blacks in Antiquity but about Blacks in the minds and thoughts of the Greeks and Romans. The Africans Snowden sees are like stones, they cannot speak for themselves, and they only become important because they are picked up by either the Greeks or the Romans. This is a strange and dangerous intellectual interpretation of African data.

An argument of the frivolous school is that the ancient Egyptians were not black and not Africans. Of course, the Egyptians were both black and African, neither fact is difficult to determine or to observe historically, geographically, culturally, or linguistically. If we mean by African a person or people whose historical cultural antecedents are in the continent of Africa no one can deny that the ancient Egyptians, so-called Pharaonic Egyptians, were Africans. It is, by the way, frivolous, almost ludicrous, to argue as David Kelley argued that the white South Africans who come to the United States ought to be called Africans Americans. The whites of South Africa find their historical antecedents in Europe and in European cultures, not in Africa. Indeed their more recent domicile in Africa did little to erase their understanding of themselves as culturally different from Africans people among whom they lived. Had they been Africans in the historical sense the past sixty years in South Africa would have been quite different. The fact that they were Europeans who believed in white supremacy led directly to their problems with Africans.

Now in a prehistoric sense science confirms the African origin of humanity and in that regard we may be said to all be Africans. However, in the period of history, where signs and symbols have created unique articulations of our experiences with environment and other humans, and where our responses have been reflected in art, writing, architecture, designs, clothes, structures of governance, and motifs of thought and behavior. Differentiation has created distinct and unique human communities. We do not have the same specific cultures or histories although in palter of concentric lines we might be able to interpret our specific experiences from the smallest unit to larger units until we embrace the world. This is why it is necessary for a scientific historiography to distinguish the imaginary from the real, the illusion from the concrete. Thus, the ancient Kemites, Egyptians if you will, were African people. They reflected the same responses to history as their continental neighbors and for the most part knew little outside of the Nile valley.

Secondly, they were black skinned people even during he rather late period when the Greeks came to Egypt to study and travel. The Greeks saw the Egyptians a black skinned and the most common word used to describe the Egyptians ‘color was melanchroes, black skinned. Had the Greeks wanted to describe them as white they would have used leucochroes but they did not. Neither did they say phrenychroes, which is brown or red skinned. The very use of the word melanchroes from the same root for words such as melanin, melanite, Melanesia, and so forth meant that there was no confusion or complex in the mind of the either Herodotus or Aristotle on this subject. I am the first to admit that both may have been bad scientists on some subjects but on the people they actually saw with their own eyes I find them credible. As to the historical method it is better to accept the witness of these ancient Greeks than late 20^th century interpreters. Aristtotle says in Physiognomonica that the Egyptians and Ethiopians are very black. This passage is translated in the Loeb as”too black” indicating that Aristotle saw the Ethiopians, Greek for burnt faces, and the Egyptians as black skinned people. He did not say the Ethiopians are “too black” but rather that both of them were very black.[9]

Aristotle’s commentary was made prior to the Greek invasion of Africa under Alexander the Macedonian and during the end of a period begun around the 6^th century BC when Thales of Miletus had entered school in Egypt. Thales studied philosophy in Egypt and subsequently became the first Greek philosopher. Aristotle is usually seen as one of the major Greek writers but rarely has he been quoted on the color of the Ethiopians and Egyptians. An observation on the complexion of the Egyptians made in the 4^th century BC. Indeed no implication is necessary when we recall the two statemnts made by Herodotus in the second book of Histories.

Herodotus claims that the people of Colchis, wherever it was located near the Black Sea and whatever its history was in reference to Egyptian conquerors, looked like the Egyptians. But what is the reason this 5^th century Greek historian makes such a definite claim that he Colchians are descended from the Egyptians. He writes that they are “black skinned and have wooly hair.” This is not the description of a European person or an Asian person. Herodotus has come under patricidal declamations by European historians who once called him the Father of History but who increasingly find him problematic. Of course, Herodotus was a product of his time and was limited in his scope and often wrote things that were fanciful. The complexion of the ancient Egyptians was not fanciful, however. In fact he knew precisely what he was talking about and although a few translators have used the term “dark skinned” for Herodotus’ description of the ancient Egyptians most admit that melanchroes is black skinned. It is good to remember that Herodotus had no bones to crack on this issue. He did not have the consciounsess of contemporary Europeans. Africans had not been victims of enslavement and had not been deprived of heritage and history. When Herodotus wrote his book, Alexander had not even been born. Thus, he was simply making an identification statement. The Colchians looked just like the Egyptians with their black skin and wooly hair. It was plan to him that Egypt was different geographically from other nations such as Greece and Persia.

Herodotus recounts a conversation that carried on between Greeks about women who were foreigners. At first it seemed that the women spoke like doves, that is, birds, to the Greeks, then when one of the women learned the Greek language, the Greeks said that the women now spoke like human beings. The Greeks referred to the doves as black to indicate that they were Egyptians. Herodotus says that the account he heard said “two black doves flew away from egyptian Thebes and while one directed its flight to Libya, the other came to them. She alighted on an oak, and sitting there began to speak with a human voice.”[10] Furthermore, he writes: “The Dodonaeans called the women doves because they were foreigners, and seemed to them to make a noise like birds.”[11] He then says that “…by calling the dove black the Dodonaeans indicated that the woman was an Egyptian.”[12]

The Study of Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt refers to Archaic and Pharaonic Egypt. The critics of Afrocentricity make two main arguments against the study of ancient Egypt. First, they say that Afrocentrists are not interested in other parts of Africa, and secondly, that Afrocentrists are interested in replicating the Greek model in Egypt. But these are inaccurate statements that have little basis in fact. More significantly theoretically however is the fact that both objections stem from a white supremacist location and illustrates precisely the false intellectual line that Afrocentrists have uncovered. To say that the Afrocentrists are not interested in other parts of Africa is patently insupportable. But what the objection to the study of Egypt reveals is the resurgence of the 19^th century idea of a “True Negro” now metamorphosed as a “true Africa.” What this objection to Egypt as Africa shows is the continuing difficulty Europeans have dealing with Africa, the most diverse continent on the face of the earth as far as human DNA is concerned.

Most Afrocentrists have a transcontinental African consciousness about research so the entire African world and all of its phenomena and penumbrations are open to this dynamic historiography. Scholars are eager to engage African in ways that suggest agency and centrality, that is, Africa as subject and actor in its own sphere and the world. New discoveries made by Afrocentrists and non-Afrocentrists in Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroons, South Africa, Malagasy are just as interesting as those made in Egypt and Nubia. But why should we leave out the study of Egypt? Should Afrocentrists abandon their interest in Algeria and Morocco before Islam? Shall we not encourage our students to conceive a history of African written from an African point of view? The meaning of such a point of view is, of course, Afrocentric.

The second objection to our study of Egypt is that we have been boxed into a reactive position of trying to study Egypt as a counter to Greece. This complaint is baseless and probably derives from a misunderstanding of Cheikh Anta Diop’s dictum that “Egypt is to Africa as Greece is to Europe.”[13] He believed that a history of Africa could not be written without including the Nile Valley civilizations. It would be like writing about Asia without China and India or Europe without Greece and Rome. The belief that he was encouraging a history of monuments is incorrect but even had he sought to make such a suggestion it would be false to see it as a response to Greece. After all, Egypt predates Greece and if anything Greece is a response to Egypt and the Greek scholars are nothing more than interpreters of an imitative society. But we all know history is far subtler than this harsh judgment. People tend to study what is accessible in terms of evidence, documents, and artifacts. Egypt possesses more historical documents than any other African civilization, perhaps more than any civilization in terms or the first and second millennia before Christ. It is therefore quite normal for more scholars to be interested in this locality.

Evidentiary records of such a society are largely of the official sort. Since we have an abundance of ready sources scholars cannot ignore them precisely because they are official. One always seeks to uncover the “real deal” and sometimes the official documents give enough evidence to assist in deeper analysis of the lives of ordinary people. Nevertheless the insistence that when Afrocentrists study Egyptians official documents this is somehow a concern with replicating the Greek model of monument is another example of a poor understanding of the Afrocentric objective. Casting Greece or what Europeans writers have done as the categorical standard is assuming a pre-eminence in interpretation and history that has neither been properly earned nor is rightly deserved given the numerous self serving and racist explanations of ancient history that one finds in Eurocentric histories.

Kemet as an Example

The ancient Egyptian word “kmt” or “Kemet” has been arbitrarily interpreted by Eurocentric scholars to mean “the Black Land.” They say that the word “kmt” could not have meant “Black People” or “Black Nation” because the Egyptians were making a comment about the blackness of the soil. The ground was black, they say. The only reason many of the early European Egyptologists could not see the meaning of “kmt” was because they refused to believe that the people were describing themselves and their nation. Or more criminally they took the chance of shifting the meaning of the word to effect a grand conspiracy against the ancient Africans. I am more inclined to believe the first reason. The word “kmt” means literally “The Black Nation” or “The Black City.” To arrive at any other conclusion one must make all kinds of unreasonable mental contortions.

Although the determinative that refers to a place name, the niswet, occurs in most instances where the word appears many scholars have been reluctant to let go of the idea that the word “kmt” meant black dirt. They look the facts in the face and experience cognitive dissonance. After all, African, to them, was outside of history and clearly the Egyptians could not have been describing their land by reference to themselves. We can see how foolish this line of reasoning is by appealing to the language itself.

Some writers argue that “kmt” but be seen in the light of “dsrt” where one is “black land” and the other is “red land.” But there is no uniformly black land in Egypt. At the Delta one could find silt from the inundation but this would be no different from silt from floods in other countries. Indeed, near Heliopolis, Ionuwu, we find some of the most dramatically read soil. One would have to argue unconvincingly that Heliopolis was not ever a part of this black land if one held to the theory of black soil. In the ancient Egyptian language the red land is more often written as hill country rather than with the determinative for city, niswet.

The impact of the Afrocentric idea is seen in the new interpretation of “kmt.” European scholars are now admitting that the explanation for the glyphs cannot be “black soil.” They have come to this understanding since African scholars have been making serious study of the Mdw Ntr. Now that reasonable scholars concede the point, made so emphatic by the ancients use of the niswet as a determinative, that “kmt” means “black country” or “black nation” what does it mean? In the first place the evidence is overwhelming that the main determinative refers to an organized political unit, a city, province, or country. Although some whites refer to “kmt” as the “black city” we must insist that this is a unique determinative understaood to represent the name of the country much like one would say Finns Land, Finland, Zulus Land, Zululand, Hun Land, Hungaria, or Angles Land, England.

There is an archaic interpretation of “kmt” and a more modern one. Both have speculative power but only one can be siad to have the authority of historical and linguistic evidence. “Kmt” in the archaic interpretation, as I am using the term, meant for the European scholars “black soil” as I have indicated. But now in a more modern sense they have revised the text to say that it means “black city.” There is an acceptance of the Afrocentrists’ contention that niswet, as a determinative, indicates a political entity. Admission that “kmt” means “black city” presents other problems for the Eurocentric writers. If it now means “black city” why would the Egyptians use color to describe a city? There is no “brown city” or “white city” or “red city.” If “kmt” is now “black city” in the text of the modern Egyptologists then it cannot mean “black dirt” or “black soil.” The word “black”, “km” did not carry negative connotations as it has in many modern European languages. To speak of Egypt as “Kmt” was to speak of a country not of dirt. Even those who argue for the connection between “dsrt” are intellectually imperiled because they cannot discover the parallel that supposedly existed in the past, that is, in the minds of the early Egyptologists, between “The Black Land” and “The Red Land.” They are not parallel because they are not in the same genre of place. The desert could not be said to exist in the North of thecountry and “Kmt” in the South when the desert actually existed everywhere, south to north, that was not riverine in the nation.

A Discourse of Dishonesty

This entire linguistic enterprise seemed to be constructed for one reason: to deny that the ancient Egyptians were black skinned people. The exasperation white scholars of the last generation and their descendants demonstrated about assigning the achievements of the African nation of Egypt to black people clearly illustrates the racial bias in historical analysis. Why would every Egyptologist open his book with a description of Egypt that said in effect that the people of Africa who created the pyramids and the marvelous civilization along the Nile Valley were not black? There is only one reason for this defensive position and that is to disconnect Egypt from the rest of Africa. In no other example of ancient history can be find a similar response to the material culture of the people. There is no debate about who built the Great Wall of China or who built the Parthenon. No contest over the ethnicity or racial classification of an ancient people has ever reached the level of the discourse on Egypt. Fed by the desire to defend the primacy and supremacy of the white race, Egyptologists sold their intellectual rights to those who paid their bills.

J. Gardner Wilkinson’s The Ancient Egyptians, was an influential work first published in l836, a few years after Champollion’s deciphering of the Mdw Ntr, and re-issued as recent as l994. Wilkinson wrote that the Egyptians were “undoubtedly from Asia; as is proved by the form of the skull, which is that of a Caucasian race, by their features, hair, and other evidences; and the whole valley of the Nile throughout Ethiopia, all Abyssinia, and the coast to the south, were peopled by Asiatic immigrations.”[14] In an extended discussion of the origin of these creators of the ancient monuments along the Nile, Wilkinson goes on to explain that “The Egyptians probably came to the Valley of the Nile as conquerors. Their advance was through Lower Egypt southwards; and the extraordinary notion that they descended, and derived their civilisation from Ethiopia has long since been exploded.”[15]

While it is true that no serious scholar would write a description such as this today the descendants of Wilkinson are found everywhere in the Academy. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used a quote from a letter to him by Miriam Lichtheim to defend his position that the ancient Egyptians were not black people. Lichtheim, according to Schlesinger, went so far as to say: “The Egyptians were not Nubians, and the original Nubians were not black. Nubia gradually became black because black peoples migrated northward out of Central Africa.”[16] The position advanced by Wilkinson became the reigning opinion of white scholars for more than a century and his influence continues until today. Of course, Wilkinson, even in l836, could have had better authority than he took advantage of to write his section on the race and origin of the Egyptians. Other observers, some much earlier, had already made more insightful commentaries about the ancient Egyptians. Count Constantin de Volney had written as early as 1791 in his book The Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolution of Empires exclaimed, “How are we astonished...when we reflect that to the race of negroes at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech; and when we recollect that, in the midst of those nations who call themselves the friends of liberty and humanity, the most barbarous of slaveries is justified, and that it is even a problem whether the understanding of negroes be of the same species with that of white men!”.[17] Volney was convinced enough to argue even further that the ancient Egyptians themselves “must have been real negroes, of the same species with all the natives of Africa.”[18] Other European scholars went against the leading edge of white supremacist teachings to announce the obvious. For example, the German scholar Erman wrote in l866: “Nothing exists in the physical structure of the ancient Egyptian to distinguish him from the the native African.”[19] Neither Volney nor Erman were to convince enough of their European fellows that their observations were valid and therefore as late as 1971 we find Egyptologists of the old school appearing in the words of David O’Connor who writes that “Thousands of sculpted and painted representations from Egypt and hundreds of well-preserved bodies from its cemeteries show that the typical physical type was neither Negroid nor Negro.”[20] O’Connor was just following the line laid down by earlier writers such as Wilkinson and Maspero. Indeed in Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orien Maspero had declared “On examining innumerable reproductions of statues and bas-reliefs, we recognized at once that the people represented on the monuments instead of presenting peculiarities and the general appearance of the Negro, really resembled the fine white races of Europe and Western Asia.[21] Maspero was clearly playing to those in whose service he was and cannot be considered serious in this observation or another one where he claims that the Egyptians ”were black skinned whites!” We are here in the terrain of the mystical.

Fortunately for us we have science as a guide in our analysis and synthesis of phenomena. In this way Afrocentrists have been able to confront the arguments advanced against an African point-of-view, pointing out that most of the time the attacks have not been based on a close location of the issues but rather the anticipated response of those who feel that their prerogatives are threatened. Hopefully, we are on the road to a more authoritative pluralism.

[1] See. Georg Hegel, Reason in History. Trans. R. Hortman. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, l982, p.3; W. Breasted, Development of Religion and Though in Ancient Egypt.. 1911; and Gaston Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orien. Paris: Hachette, 1917, pp. 17-18.

[2] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History. London: Oxford University Press, l987, Volume One, pp. 5-23.

[3] J. D. Fage, A History of West Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 2-14.

[4] See Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

[7] Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: The Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, l998, 2^nd Ed., pp. 23-26.

[8] Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideology of White Supremacy and the European Slave Trade,” paper presented at UNESCO Conference on “The Slave Routes” in Lisbon, Portugal, December, 1998.

[13] Cheikh Anta Diop, Parente genetique de l’Egyptien Pharaonique et des langues Negro-Africaine. Dakar: IFAN, Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1977, p. xxv.

[14] J. Gardner Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians. London: Guernsey, 1994, p. 302.

[16] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America. Knoxville: Whittle Communications, 1992, p. l30

[17] C. F. Volney, The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolution of Empires. London: G.G.J. and James Robinson, 1791

[18] C. F. Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785. London: G.G.J. and James Robinson, 1787.

[19] Adolf Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt. New York: Dover Publications, l971 (originally published in l886 in German and in English in l894), p. 29.

[20] Ancient Egypt and Black Africa: Early Contacts,” Expedition: The Magazine of Archaeology/Anthropology, 14, l971, p. 2

[21] Gaston Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orien. Paris: Hachette, 1917, pp. 17-18, 12^th ed., translated as The Dawn of Civilization. London, l894, and reprinted by Frederick Ungar,New York, l968