Race
in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa
By Molefi Kete Asante
Africa's influence on ancient
Greece, the oldest European civilization, was profound and significant
in art, architecture, astronomy, medicine, geometry, mathematics,
law, politics, and religion. Yet there has been a furious campaign
to discredit African influence and to claim a miraculous birth
for Western civilization. A number of books and articles by white
and some black conservatives seek to disprove the Egyptian influence
on Greece.
One of the most recent
works in this genre is a book by Wellesley professor Mary Lefkowitz,
Not Out of Africa. It continues what Martin Bernal calls
in Black Athena the Aryanist tradition of attacking African
agency in regard to Greece by raising strawpeople arguments and
then knocking them over. This is unfortunate but to be expected
by an intellectual tradition that supports the dominant mythologies
of race in the history of the West by diverting attention to marginal
issues in the public domain.
Afrocentricity seeks to
discover African agency in every situation. Who are we? What did
we do? Where did we travel? What is our role in geometry? How
do we as a people function in this or that contemporary situation?
But the Afrocentrist does not advance African particularity as
universal. This is its essential difference from Eurocentricity
which is advanced in the United States and other places as if
the particular experiences of Europeans is universal. This imposition
is ethnocentric and often racist. Afrocentricity advances the
view that it is possible for a pluralism of cultures to exist
without hierarchy but this demands cultural equality and respect.
Mary Lefkowitz' book has
sought to re-assert the idea that Greece did not receive substantial
contributions from Kemet, the original name of Egypt, which is
the Greek name for the ancient land. Professor Lefkowitz has offered
the public a pablum history which ignores or distorts the substantial
evidence of African influence on Greece in the ancient writings
of Aetius, Strabo, Plato, Homer, Herodotus, Diogenes, Plutarch,
and Diodorus Siculus. A reader of Lefkowitz' book must decide
if she or he is going to believe those who wrote during the period
or someone who writes today. History teaches us that a person
is more likely to distort an event the farther away from it she
happens to be. If you have a choice, go with the people who saw
the ancient Egyptians and wrote about what they saw.
Conservative white columnists
have felt a tremendous need to respond in the most vigorous fashion
with their applause to shore up their racial mythologies. And
now George Will (Newsweek, February 12, 1996) and Roger
Kimball (Wall Street Journal, February 14, 1996) have seen
fit to bless Professor Mary Lefkowitz' Not Out of Africa as
a sort of definitive moment in intellectual history. It is no
such moment. It is a racial argument clearly fast back-stepping.
As is too often the case these days, however, Lefkowitz received
the go-ahead to attack Afrocentricity by writing this book of
blacks such as Anthony Appiah and Henry Gates. They have, of course,
had a real problem with the Afrocentric idea.
What this indicates is
that we have gone full circle from the Hegelian "Let us forget
Africa" to a late 20th century attack on African scholarship by
declaring, in the face of the evidence, that major influences
on Greece were not out of Africa. And as such it will simply confirm
the inability of some scholars to get beyond the imposition of
their particularism of Europe. No one can remove the gifts of
Europe nor should that ever be the aim of scholarship but Greece
cannot impose itself as some universal culture that developed
full-blown out of nothing, without the foundations it received
from Africa.
The aim of Professor Lefkowitz
is to support the unsupportable idea of a miraculous Greece and
thus to enhance a white supremacist myth of the ancient world.
Perhaps George Will and Roger Kimball believe that that they have
found a savior of the pure white thesis. They are wrong. The thesis
cannot be supported with facts although Professor Lefkowitz goes
to great length to confuse the picture by concentrating on irrelevancies.
Professor Mary Lefkowitz'
work pales besides the research done by Cornell professor Martin
Bernal, Black Athena, the late Cheikh Anta Diop,
author of Civilization or Barbarism, and Temple professor
Theophile Obenga, author of the important La Philosophie Africaine
de la période Pharonique, (African Philosophy in
the Age of the Pharoahs) or the forthcoming work by Professor
Maulana Karenga on ancient Egyptian ethics.
The press fanfare granted
Not out of Africa, however, does demonstrate how noise
can be confused with music. But what is more worrisome is that
it demonstrates a glee, although misinformed, of those who feel
some sense of relief that a white scholar has taken on the Afrocentrists,
a kind of white hope idea. This stems, as I believe George Will
has shown in his essay on the subject, from what is viewed as
white salvation from the irrationality of Afrocentrists. It originates
in an historical anti-African bias and Roger Kimball nearly gloated
that readers would "savor" Lefkowitz' "definitive dissection of
Afrocentrism." Contrary to any definitive dissection of Afrocentrism
what Professor Lefkowitz offered was a definitive exposure of
the principal assumptions of a racial structure of classical knowledge.
Professor Lefkowitz is
conversant with many Greek sources but as she admits this is the
first time that she has ventured into these waters. This is unfortunate
because she has created a false security among those who believe
that Greece sprung like a miracle unborn and untaught. Bringing
Frank Snowden in the discussion of the ancient world does not
help because Professor Snowden's book Blacks in Antiquity:
Ethiopians in the Graeco-Roman Experience is fatally flawed
as a Eurocentric interpretation of the African past. His objective
was to demonstrate that Africans existed in the imaginations and
experience of Greece and Rome. He succeeded in stripping all agency
from Africans. The problem is that Ethiopia in the form of Nubia
and Kemet (Egypt) existed thousands of years before there was
a Greece or Rome. To start a discussion of the ancient world with
800 B.C is certainly poor scholarship. But Professor Lefkowitz
reliance on Snowden is the least of her problems.
The book is badly written
and terribly redundant as if she is in a hurry to enlarge a relatively
poor argument. How many times can you really say that George G.
M. James should not have used the term "stolen legacy" when he
claimed that the Africans influenced the Greeks? Professor James
certainly had just as much rhetorical justification as Professor
Lefkowitz who chose the unsubtle title "Not Out of Africa" probably
for the same reason as Professor James called his book Stolen
Legacy.
Ruling classes always seek
to promote and to maintain their ruling mythologies. Professor
Lefkowitz' passion in trying to walk a tight rope between support
of the false mythology of a Greek miracle and the facts of Egyptian
influence on the early Greeks is telling. She seeks to minimize
the role Egypt played in civilizing Greece by claiming that only
in art and architecture was there real influence. This flies in
the face of the ancient observers and beneficiaries of the largesse
of the Africans.
Mary Lefkowitz's Not
Out of Africa, has demonstrated the tremendous power of a
false idea especially when it is advanced in the halls of the
Academy. I have come to believe that it is a part of a larger
falsification that encompasses the various right-wing ideologies
that parade as truth. They are rooted in the same dogma: reason
is the gift of the Greeks. The Greeks are Europeans, Europeans
are white, white people gave the world reason and philosophy.
This is not only a bad idea it is a false idea. It is a bad idea
because it preaches a European triumphalism and it is a false
idea because the historical record is contrary. Tragically the
idea that Europeans have some different intellectual or scientific
ability is accepted doctrine and some scholars will go to any
length to try to uphold it. Usually, as Lefkowitz does, they commit
four fundamental flaws:
They attack insignificant
or trivial issues to obscure the main points.
Professor Lefkowitz has
three main axes to grind in her book. The first is that a student
told her that she believed Socrates was black. The second is that
the Greek gods came from Africa which she attributes to Martin
Bernal, the author of Black Athena, and to Cheikh Anta
Diop, the author of The African Origin of Civilization.
The third is that freemasonry is the source of George James' claim
in his book Stolen Legacy that the Greeks got many of their
major ideas from the Egyptians.
The main point made by
Afrocentrists is that Greece owes a substantial debt to Egypt
and that Egypt was anterior to Greece and should be considered
a major contributor to our current knowledge. I think I can say
without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that
either Socrates or Cleopatra were black. I have never seen these
ideas written by an Afrocentrist nor have I heard them discussed
in any Afrocentric intellectual forums. Professor Lefkowitz provides
us with a hearsay incident which she probably reports accurately.
It is not an Afrocentric argument.
I believe that both Bernal
and Diop have done admirable jobs making their own cases on the
legendary origins of the Greeks and I believe that readers should
go to the sources themselves to see whose case, theirs or Professor
Lefkowitz', is most plausible. I am convinced from my reading
that the relationship between ancient Greece and Africa was closer
and more familiar than Greece's relationship to Northern Europe.
They will make assertion
and offer their own interpretations as evidence.
Professor Lefkowitz makes
a statement on page 1 of her book that "In American universities
today not everyone knows what extreme Afrocentists are doing in
their classrooms. Or even if they do know, they choose not to
ask questions." We are off to a bad start. Who are these extreme
Afrocentrists? She does not provide us with one example of something
that an extreme Afrocentrist is teaching in a classroom. Not one.
But already the reader is inclined to believe that something exists
where nothing exists. No matter how passionate, assertion is not
evidence. What Afrocentrists do teach is that you cannot begin
the discussion of world history with the Greeks. Creating clouds
of suspicion about scholarly colleagues in order to support a
racial mythology developed over the past centuries to accompany
European enslavement of Africans, imperialism, and exploitation
will not dissipate the fact of Greece's debt to Africa.
They will undermine
writers they previously supported in order to maintain the fiction
of a Greek miracle.
Professor Lefkowitz and
others who once considered Herodotus to be the Father of History
now find fault with Herodotus because as Afrocentrists read Book
Two of Histories we find that Herodotus glorifies the achievements
of Egypt in relationship to Greece. But Herodotus is not the only
ancient Greek writer to be dismissed by classicists who accept
what Bernal rightly calls an Aryan interpretation of the ancient
world.
Aristotle reported that
the Egyptians gave the world the study of geometry and mathematics
and the Aryanists argue that Aristotle made mistakes in what he
observed. Professor Lefkowitz carries the denial of the ancient
Greeks to a new level saying essentially that you cannot trust
Homer, Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, or Strabo. Her position is
that Strabo, like Herodotus, depended too much on what the Egyptian
priests told him. Every Greek who wrote on the overwhelming impact
of Egypt(Africa) on Greece (Europe) is discredited or set up to
be discredited by the Aryanists. The idea to abandon the Greek
authors rests on the belief that these ancient Greek writers cannot
be counted upon to support the theories of white supremacy.
They will announce both
sides of an issue are correct, then move to uphold only the side
that supports European triumphalism.
Professor Lefkowitz could
have admitted that Egypt during the times of the Pharaohs, whatever
interpretation you have of that ancient society, for example,
as ornamented with Mystery Schools or simply filled with keepers
of mysteries at the temples of Ipet sut, Edfu, Kom Ombo, Philae,
Esna, Abydos, and other cities, was the source of much of Greek
knowledge. Rather she claims that the only real impact of Egypt
on Greece was in art and architecture. This is to state an obvious
fact in order to obscure the deeper influences in science, astronomy,
geometry, literature, religion, mathematics, law, government,
music, medicine, and philosophy.
Professor Lefkowitz' major
points are not only flawed but her reasoning is faulty and cannot
be sustained by any inquiry into the Greek or Egyptian languages
or into ancient history. She wonders why the Afrocentric perspective
is plausible to so many intelligent people. Clearly it is plausible
to intelligent people because they do not believe that there was
some unique brand of intelligence that struck the Greeks and created
a Greek miracle willy-nilly without contact with the civilized
world. In most cases knowledge builds upon knowledge. In the case
of the ancient Greeks they tell us that they built upon the Egyptians.
Should we believe them or should we believe the modern Aryanist
interpreters who want to dismiss the ancient Greek observers?
What are the substantial
arguments advance by Afrocentrists, not the hearsay comments of
a student or some rhetorical repartee between public debaters?
What Afrocentrists articulate (see Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity
and Knowledge. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990; Theophile
Obenga, A Lost Tradition: African Philosophy in World History,
Philadelphia: Source, 1995) is that the Greeks were students of
the Egyptians. Readers should see the works of Yosef Ben-Jochannon
and George G. M. James for themselves rather than rely on the
misinterpretations and distortions of others.
On these facts we stand:
*Ancient Egyptians were
black people.
*Egyptian civilization
precedes Greece by several thousand years
*The pyramids are completed
(2500 BC) long before Homer appears (800 BC)
*Philosophy originates
in Africa and the first Greek philosophers (Thales, Isocrates)
studied in Egypt
* A discussion of the wise,
wisdom, (sb) appears on tomb of Antef in 2052 BC
*Thales of Miletus is not
a philosopher until 600 BC
Among Greek historians
and others who wrote about what the Greeks learned from Egypt
are Homer, Herodotus, Iamblicus, Aetius, Diodorous Siculus, Diogenes
Laertius, Plutarch, and Plato. Who were some of the Greek students
of Africans, according to the ancient records? They were Plato,
Solon, Lycurgus, Democritus, Anaxamander, Anaxagoras, Herodotus,
Homer, Thales, Pythagoras, Eudoxus, and Isocrates and many others.
Some of these students even wrote of their studies in Egypt as
well.
There are many other points
that are debatable in Lefkowitz' book but I do not have space
to discuss all of them in this essay. However, I do want to point
out that she is also wrong on the issue of Alexandria. The City
of Alexandria built in honor of Alexander of Macedonia was not
a new city, the Greeks simply expanded an existing city and changed
its name. The ancient Egyptian city of Rhacôtis, which probably
had an even older name, was the original African city upon which
Alexandria was built much like Kinshasa under the Belgians was
expanded and changed to Leopoldville. Triumphalism has a way of
insinuating itself into everything and then claiming that it is
original.
In the end I have asked
myself, what is Professor Lefkowitz' point, why does she see the
need to challenge Bernal, James, Diop, or to question my integrity?
She states very clearly that her project is about sustaining the
American myth of European triumphalism. In her own words:
