|
Africa and Africans
in Antiquity by Edwin Yamauchi (Michigan State University Press,
2001)
Reviewed by Molefi Kete Asante
 Edwin
Yamauchi has produced a very telling book with the publication of
Africa and Africans in Antiquity. It is at once the best re-statement
of the traditionalist perspective on ancient Africa and at the same
time a symbol of what happens when Eurocentric scholars talk among
themselves. I do not believe that it is possible to discover a better
overview of the traditional view of Africa in Antiquity than this
collection of essays by quite distinguished scholars of ancient
Africa. All of the writers for this volume have credentials that
suggest their work in the field is long and credible in academic
circles. To the credit of Edwin Yamauchi he has collected the papers
of this distinguished cadre of scholars in an attractive volume.
Often a reviewer is able to say
that a book is uneven in the strength of its contributors; this
is not really the situation in this case. Africa and Africans in
Antiquity is consistent in both the quality of the writing and the
perspective of the contributors. The book emerged from conference
papers delivered March 1-2, 1991 at Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio, under the auspices of the E. E. McClellan Lecture Fund and
the Departments of Art, Classics, Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.
The nine scholars whose papers were delivered at the conference
and the two additional scholars added to the collection represent
a formidable who's who in the field of African antiquity. In this
sense, the book is a remarkable achievement of consistency.
Of course its beauty as an intellectual
project covers a multitude of problems easily revealed when one
scrapes the surface of many of the arguments made in the book. I
am the first to admit that books often arrive long after their time
has come and gone. The fact that the book appears ten years after
the papers were presented, and new information emerges, is not the
most compelling issue; authors and editors often cannot dictate
the publication date of their works and many good publications cannot
find a publisher.
However, the most compelling issues
for me are in two general categories. In the first place, the book
suffers from a lack of theoretical breadth and in the second place
it lacks any commitment to the serious scholarship done by African
and African American scholars, with the notable exception of the
work by the Eurocentric Frank Snowden. Indeed, even Snowden fails
to fully understand or grasp the paradigm shift in the thinking
done about African antiquity by continental and diasporan Africans.
Snowden is the best example of
the African scholar who cannot see beyond the Eurocentric worldview
and thus is not able to disentangle himself from the web of Europe's
suffocating racism toward Africa. Although Snowden has done meticulous
work, unearthing details about Africa's past, he has done so from
the standpoint of Africa as an object and Europe as a subject. Thus,
his essay "Attitudes towards Blacks in the Greek and Roman
World" sets us in the wrong direction. What about attitudes
of Greeks in the Nubian and Kemetic World? But alas, this is much
too deep for Snowden whose aim is to suggest that blacks were important
to the Greeks and Romans as if ancient Egyptians and Nubians appeared
when they were recognized in Greek literature. Most contemporary
African scholars could care less about what the attitudes of Greeks
and Romans were in regards to Africans. What they want to know is
about the agency of Africans themselves in antiquity. I don't believe
Snowden is able to detach himself from his Eurocentric training
long enough to notice that he is asking the wrong question. When
Yamauchi entitled his book, Africa and Africans in Antiquity, it
was an advance in thinking because he did not consciously tie it
to the Greeks and Romans. Perhaps there is a place for such orientation
but it is unfortunate that Snowden, the only African writer in the
group, could not rise to the theoretical challenge presented by
an overwhelming Eurocentric conference. Snowden is not the only
author who has this difficulty.
Frank Yurco, a consultant to the
Field Museum in Chicago and an instructor at the Oriental Institute's
Adult Program, makes a robust contribution to the discussion of
Nubia. He is well read in the literature of the day, able to organize
it with some rationality, but he is unfortunately unable to escape
whatever training he has received from Egyptologists. Consequently
what could have been a masterful exploration of the cultural and
political agency of an African civilization in its own right ends
up in his essay being the discussion of a marginalized Nubia, subservient
to Egypt in every way. Of course, the idea of Nubia being peripheral
to Egypt grows from the mistaken belief that the Egyptians were
not black-skinned people. The problem with this construction is
not simply that it is untrue, but more it is systemic in Yurco's
understanding of the Nile River valley.
Location is the momentary psychical
and cultural space occupied by a critic, theorist, or practitioner
of knowledge. In the case of Yurco one can tell his location early
in his essay. When he writes several times of the "Egypto-Coptic"
style, sense, architecture, language, or whatever, you know to expect
a Greco-Germanic interpretation of African antiquity. On a surface
level to say "Copt" is to say "Egyptian" and
thus to speak of "Egypto-Coptic" style would be nonsense,
like saying, "Egyptian-Egyptian" were it not for the more
insidious inclination of such terminology. To say "Coptic"
introduces the Greek presence in ancient Egypt. There was a significant
Greek presence in Kemet only beginning in the 4th century B.C. Therefore,
to speak of ancient Africa and "Egypto-Coptic" is a misnomer.
But the Eurocentrist can almost never see Africa in its own right,
definitionally they must take African ideals and ideas and re-cast
them as Greek or European influences. There is no Kemetic-Coptic
relationship when Weni and Harkhuf make their journeys into Nubia.
At the time of Senurset, Ramses, Hatshepsut, Tarharka, and Piye,
the "Copts" do not exist. The word is from "aguptos"
from the Greek language. When the Greek speakers of the Divine Language
wrote the Kemetic language they used Greek characters rather than
the ancient glyphs and called the language "Coptic." This
writing system is Greek, not African. The issue is that Yurco's
construction would confuse the reader who does not understand his
collapsing of time from 3500 B.C. to 300 B.C. Until the time of
Alexander of Macedonia there was only a Kemetic, that is, Egyptian
heritage; no Egypto-Coptic anything. In fact, the Coptic language
did not exist at the time of the Macedonian conquest in 333 B.C.
The one author whose work seems
to appear without ideological content is that of Edna Russman, curator
of Egyptian Art at the Brooklyn Museum. I found her article on "Egypt
and the Kushites: Dynasty XXV" without pomp, bombast, or hyperbole.
The writing is careful, scholarly, direct, and does not overstretch
the evidence with the Egyptological speculation found in most other
pieces in the book. Such speculation I have dubbed the leaning tower
of probability because the speculation always leans toward a Eurocentric
interpretation and away from an African agency interpretation.
Perhaps of equal seriousness is
the fact that no African or African American scholar is cited by
any of the writers other than Orlando Patterson cited by Frank Snowden.
There are two problems with this lack of citation. In the first
place it smacks of racism in scholarship because what is assumed
is that nothing written by African scholars on African antiquity
is meaningful, even when what they are writing about is Africa and
Africans in antiquity. How would it look for a collection of writers
to discuss Europe and Europeans in Antiquity and not cite any European
descended authors as authorities? Part of the problem the Afrocentrists
have addressed is this assumption that Africans cannot teach Europeans
anything, not even about their own continent. The second problem
with this lack of citation is that it suggests the writers are not
familiar with all of the evidence. This is even a more critical
fault because it also means they are presenting their data and evidences
without an eye toward what African Americans or continental Africans
have written in the many African journals as well as the Journal
of African Civilization, the Journal of Black Studies, or the Journal
of Negro History, as an example. Ancient Africa is not, and cannot
be, some special preserve of white authors, particularly since we
know that white authors have historically distorted the face of
Africa in the interest of service to Europe. While it may be considered
radical, the Afrocentric impetus to correct this wrong emerges in
a work like the recently edited book by Ama Mazama and myself, Egypt
vs. Greece in the American Academy. Another work that has clearly
demonstrated a much more enlightened approach to ancient Africa
is Christos Evangeliou's When Greece Met Africa: The Genesis of
Hellenic Philosophy. In his 1994 work Evangeliou, a scholar of Greek
descent, made the brilliant observation "if it appears that
the picture, which the Greeks had of themselves and the people around
them, especially the Egyptians, does not cohere with the picture
which is presented by Northern Europeans" (Evangeliou, 1994,
p. 4). One could say that the ancient Africans probably had a different
view of themselves than that promoted by books such as Africa and
Africans in Antiquity.
It should be noted that several
chapters are particularly outstanding in providing the reader with
strong overviews of some lesser known discussions in African history.
Reuben G.Bullard's "The Berbers of the Maghreb and Ancient
Carthage" is one of the best portraits of the general field
of Imazighen studies. Bullard covers most of the theories of origin
and development of the people of the Maghreb. In addition, Kathryn
A. Bard and Rodolfo Fattovich's "Some Remarks on the Processes
of State Formation in Egypt and Ethiopia" is a good comparative
analysis of state formation in two ancient African societies. Taken
together, however, this book is handicapped by the editor's own
lack of vision as stated in the introduction when he writes that
the "Afrocentric scholars, in seeking to reclaim the achievements
of the continent for African Americans have gone to the other extreme
in claiming that they are the rightful heirs to the glories of Egypt,
as though the Egyptians were black Africans. This is rather ironic
in that the Egyptians were among the most ethnocentric of all peoples
and generally regarded black Africans of Nubia, as well as all other
non-Egyptians, with contempt" (Yamauchi, 2001, p. 1). In the
end this is not just Yamauchi's opening line, it is his closing
point as well; perhaps this is the point of the book. Unfortunately,
Yamauchi repeats the propagandistic mantra of reactionary scholars
against Afrocentricty by stating a falsehood as if it is truth.
Vehemence is never a replacement for reason in discourse. Afrocentrists
argue that Egypt is an African civilization. African people are
largely black but some are brown; the ancient Egyptians, from all
ancient sources, were "black skinned with wooly hair"
(Herodotus, Histories, Bk. II). This is the issue that is apparently
at the core of this book. It creates, inter alia, many distortions
and mistakes. For example, Yamauchi arguing that the Egyptians were
not black claims that the Egyptians regarded so-called "black
Africans of Nubia" with contempt. This is a spurious argument.
The Germans regarded the Russians with contempt during World War
II and they remained Europeans with similar appearances. The Hutu
regarded the Tutsi with contempt and they were all Africans. During
the last great Asian war, the Japanese regarded the Chinese and
Koreans with contempt and they were all Asians. One cannot argue
that because the Egyptian nation hated the Nubian nation that it
was an indication that the Egyptians were not black. Such circuitous
logic is what complicates the reading of what would have been an
otherwise valuable contribution to the discourse on ancient Africa,
but as it stands the work is fraught with political and cultural
bias.
Probably the central issue to the
enterprise represented by the works in Africa and Africans in Antiquity
is the impact of Africa on Europe, that is, Egypt on Greece. An
underlying concern in the writing of this volume is that the Afrocentrists
have positioned African culture at the fountainhead, not only to
Africa but to many of the ideas found in Greece. This is unacceptable
to the votarists of a pure white theology of rationalism. How could
this be when Africans were enslaved by Europeans? But clearly the
classical Greeks believed that a lot of their civilization was derived
from African sources. Those who have argued the notion of a Greek
autochthonous culture have muddied the waters in order to obscure
the ancient truth. In the Odyssey it is reported that Helen learned
medical arts in Egypt. There are numerous such examples in the mythological
and historical texts, in the pre-philosophical and philosophical
literatures of Greece. The fact is a book like Africa and Africans
in Antiquity could have been a singular contribution to the advancement
of truth and science had so many of the authors not written from
a Eurocentric perspective with an eye toward intellectual hegemony.
Nevertheless, I applaud any effort that seeks to engage the very
complex issue of African, hence, human antiquity.
Scholarly Papers |
Book/Film Reviews |
Newspaper/Magazine Articles
|
