History in Black

African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past

Yaacov Shavit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317791836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The development of Afrocentric historical writing is explored in this study which traces this recording of history from the Hellenistic-Roman period to the 19th century. Afrocentric writers are depicted as searching for the unique primary source of "culture" from one period to the next. Such passing on of cultural traits from the "ancient model" from the classical period to the origin of culture in Egypt and Africa is shown as being a product purely of creative history.

1

The Foundations of Afrocentric Universal History

Even people who emerged only yesterday from the darkness of African barbarism now regard themselves as culturally equal or superior to the old Western lords of the earth.

Christopher Dawson, ‘Europe in Eclipse’, in The Dynamics of World History, 1975, 407.

History should ignore the question of the first origin and leave it to either prehistory or metaphysics.

August Ludwig Schölzer¹

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That Het’rogeneaus This, an Englishmen …

Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishmen

THE QUEST FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY

If there existed an African Odysseus in ancient times, there was no Homer to tell us of his voyage. We have not a single book written by an African traveler who, like Egyptian or Greek travelers, left his continent and visited foreign lands, returning home to tell his story. This is not because such a work existed and was lost or, worse, was destroyed by white colonizers; it is because no such book was ever written (Diop states that ‘the message of writing never disappeared from Black Africa’,² but cannot provide any solid evidence for the use of script in equatorial Africa before the coming of Islam). Nor did the peoples of ancient Africa ever write a history of either local or ‘universal’ type. Africa had no Hecataeus, Herodotus or Pliny the Elder, just as it had no Ezekiel, Zechariah or St John. What enables the ‘universal history’ of the ‘black race’ to be written today is the world’s ancient and classical heritage and modern scholarship; indeed, this new history is based on the foundations of classical and modern ‘Western’ universal history.

We may say that the new Afrocentric historical literature is the writing of the missing travel and history books, sailing forth on the winds of myth and folk-tales, histories, comparative philology and archaeology. In doing so Afrocentrists follow a long Western tradition and as such, constitute one more link in a very long chain of tireless speculative and scholarly efforts to write a universal history – while radically changing the nature of its framework and content – a chain which includes race morphology, comparative mythology and comparative philology. Their literature is yet another example of the deep and urgent need of communities and nations to review and reconstruct themselves ‘against the background of the totality of the cultural achievement of mankind’.³

‘All men’, wrote Diodorus Siculus (of Sicily, first century BC) in the introduction to his Library of History (Bibliotheca Historica), ‘should accord great gratitude to those writers who have composed universal histories’, because they provide a systematic treatment of world history, a trouble-free education in useful knowledge, and at the same time, attempt to record ‘the common affairs of the inhabited world as though they were those of a single state, have made of their treaties a single reckoning of past events and a common clearing-house of knowledge concerning them’ (Diod. 1.1–3).⁴ All men indeed do share a common ancestry, despite being separated by time and space.

These aims were the primary motivations behind the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman world geographies and ethnographies: to provide a ‘good read’ together with the best account of orbis terrarum; by doing so they created the imago mundi of their time. The first writers of universal histories were eager to furnish their curious readers with a wealth of knowledge about known and as yet unknown regions and peoples. The early Ionian historians were the first to produce geographical guidebooks (periegesis) in which they described the lands and cultures beyond Asia Minor, their homeland.⁵ In their universal histories the Greeks sought to record everything that was known about all human societies and to reveal the contacts between the various branches of the human species, as well as their similarities and differences.⁶

The Greek and Roman empires, with their cosmopolitan character and pervasive intellectual curiosity, were fertile ground for the writing of general ethnographic works (such as the Aethiopika, Indika, Persika, Aegyptiaka, Babyloniaka, etc.) and general histories (based on a common literary model) which we may call ‘secular’ or even ‘scientific’, which claimed to be encyclopedic. Knowledge about the world, such as that given by Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis, served not only intellectual curiosity but also pragmatic needs: the Romans were rulers of the world and many of them traveled in it, thus, pragmatic knowledge was most useful and welcome.⁷

But universal history was far more than a product of intellectual curiosity. The major motivation behind the efforts to understand the history of the world on a large scale was the wish to understand the order of things and discover the organizing principles of world affairs and human behavior. The first principle of universal history is the morphological–genealogical order, reflected in the division of humanity into ethnic groups and nations, marked by different customs (the nomima), social order and behavior and linguistic differentiation. Universal history (or anthropology) asks what is the source of this diversity; is it an absolute distinction, or is there a certain unity behind this diversity? Is there any common denominator between Greek and barbarian, Jew and gentile, Chinese and the people who dwell on the other side of the Great Wall?⁸ The second principle consists of rules which guide, direct and govern human history. In the words of Momigliano, the historian tries to find ‘if not meaning, at least some order to the story of mankind’.⁹ What, for example, is the underlying logic behind the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms? Do identical laws determine the fates of different societies? Does human history follow a fixed historical design and fixed historical rules? Does human history have a defined purpose?¹⁰

Biblical prophecies, and the eschatological literature of the Second Temple period and beyond¹¹ (as well as Christian eschatology), proclaimed the redemption of all humankind¹² and held to a belief in the unity of the human world. They refer to portentous historical events enacted by a supreme deity toward the fulfillment of a grand design, the unfolding and meaning of which is bound up in the destiny of the Jewish people.¹³ In fact, universal history is the provenance of every teleological–eschatological concept of history. History, in this approach, is not just an ‘accidental’ concatenation of interconnected facts. History has a reason and a purpose, and if historical development had a fixed order and a comprehensible meaning, what were they? Did the laws of history apply to all societies and civilizations? Was a ‘sacred order’, or a universal order directed by diverse natural forces at work? Did history move in recurring cycles and a succession of ages, or did it progress toward a predetermined purpose? Did ‘history’ per se have no meaning, or was ‘history’ a code of destruction and redemption?

Does the Afrocentric theory accept the notion of the unity of mankind, and if so, what is the Afrocentrist meaning of this unity? Does it accept the notion that history has a goal, and if so, what is the place of the black race in this universal scheme? Does it believe in the equality of races or in racial hierarchy?

The answer to this question is that Afrocentric universal history is founded on racial premises concerning the genesis and evolution of the history of mankind and the meaning of this history.

1. There is a single black race characterized by common, uniform and constant physiognomic and physiogenetic traits; the geographical boundaries of this black race extend well beyond the African continent to all other four continents.

2. A race is more than a biological fact; it engenders distinctive shared ontological features and character traits, as well as a typical world-view (Wesen).

3. These basic traits never change and are the common source of the black civilization’s cultural production. No geographical or cultural change which may occur over the centuries can affect this everlasting, intrinsic foundation.

4. Racial affiliation is equivalent to ‘cultural association’.

5. The black race is the global source and disseminator of culture; thus, it situates people of the black race on almost every continent: the Aegean orbit, Mesopotamia, the Far East, the Americas, the southern lands of Europe. As a result it creates a completely new mapa mundi which is far more than a network of migration, diffusion and transmission lines, focusing on Africa. In this new map, Africa is not only the disseminator of culture and civilization; humanity is now painted black: the black race populates virtually every corner of the globe, bringing along with it its genius and achievements. This, needless to say, asserts the superiority of the black race.

6. The monogenetic origin of humanity was only the first stage of its development. Other races, primarily the Caucasian (white) race, appeared with their distinct beliefs, symbols, ideas, character. This monogenetic approach is based, of course, on biblical foundations, however, there are those (including African-Americans) who hold the view that this racial diversity is a result of polygenetic origin.

This is a universal history based on the principle of race; a history of blacks and a history in black. The purpose of this theory is to endow the black race with a universal history: not a history confined to the black continent or to the blacks in North or South America, but the history of a black race universally dispersed, with a central status in human history.

The inevitable point of departure for the Afrocentric world-view, then, was to decide between two different opinions concerning the origins and genesis of mankind: biblical and scientific monogenism on the one hand, and pseudo-scientific polygenism on the other.

AFROCENTRICITY AND MONOGENISM

‘Polygenism and monogenism’, writes George W. Stoking, Jr, ‘can be regarded as specific expressions of enduring alternative attitudes toward the variety of mankind’,¹⁴ as well as towards the classification of human groups. The monogenetic theory is based on the presumption that human races diverged from one common ancestor. Different races developed from this one genetic source and the external and internal difference between them is the result of historical development (or climatic conditions)¹⁵. On the other hand, polygenism believes that man was created in different races, differing from each other both externally and internally from the very beginning, and that this fact is responsible for the gap between the races, their distinct cultures (language, myth, ritual and objects).¹⁶ These two theories triggered a relentless search for the primordial home (Urheimat), or homes of one or other of the different races.

Monogenists and polygenists can find themselves on the same side of the argument,¹⁷ both were used to draw an evolutionary scheme on universal scale which could confirm the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of the black race.¹⁸ This innate inferiority was regarded either as a result of the intellectual mental inferiority of the black race, or its very slow cultural evolution. According to this theory, each human race advanced beyond the ancestral ape and developed a different mentality;¹⁹ hence, there are superior and inferior races. However, the same theory serves the idea that every race can ascend in due time to a higher stage of civilization, either as a result of borrowing from a superior culture, or due to its own progress.²⁰

Radical Afrocentrists argue that it is the black race that has been the superior race from the dawn of human history. Thus, theoretically speaking, the Afrocentric world-view could easily accept the polygenetic theory and thus claim that the white race was, from its first appearance on earth, an inferior race, since it is a later degenerated offspring of the ‘black race’. But Afrocentric writings usually accept the monogenetic theory to substantiate the superiority of the black race.²¹ The adoption of monogenism and the rejection of polygenism stem from the fact that Afrocentrism has adopted the notion that there was one racial source of human races and human culture, that the geographical core was Africa and that the black race was the gene pool of humanity. According to this Afrocentric monogentic theory, the fact that the black race was the ‘gene pool’ endows upon the black race a status of superiority as the sole source of all human races. Since it was the primordial race, it was the first to create human civilization and hence bestow its achievements on all other cultures.

From its monogenetic point of view, then, Afrocentric literature which deals with prehistoric times and the evolution of mankind accepts the ‘African theory’; that is, that Homo erectus emerged approximately 1.5 million years ago in East Africa to become Homo sapiens (wise man), and then spread to all the other continents 100,000 years ago. The first Homo sapiens was black. As a result, all the other continents were populated from Africa by people of the black race who migrated from one place to another, settled in every continent and brought their culture along with them.²² Much of Afrocentric literature related to pre-history is devoted to tracing the tracks of this grand migration to Asia, Europe, the two Americas and Australia.²³

If, however, the accepted view is that the human race is black in origin, but was later divided into different races, what, then, is the explanation offered by the Afrocentrists for the physiogenetic differences between the races? Is it, in their view, a result of physiogenetic mutations or of environmental conditions? In Diop’s view, for example, the racial differentiation took place in Europe between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago as a result of the cold climate: ‘… humanity was born in Africa and differentiated itself into several races in Europe’.²⁴ Blacks, he writes, ‘survived everywhere in Europe until the Neolithic period’,²⁵ while some of these s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Calling on Our Forefathers – History as Redemption and Resurrection
• 1. The Foundations of Afrocentric Universal History
• 2. The Revival of Ancient Historical Traditions in Black America: The Four Revised ‘Ancient Models’
• 3. Making-up Stories of Egypt
• 4. The Egyptian Tyranny over Greece in the Bronze Age
• 5. The Glory that Was Egypt: The Heliocentric Theory
• 6. The Second Ancient Model: A History of Debt
• 7. Ancient Egypt and the Foundation of Western Philosophy and Science
• 8. The Quest for Ancient Egypt’s Black Identity
• 9. The Curse of Canaan and the Black Presence in the Bible
• 10. The ‘Noble Ethiopian’: Symbol and Reality
• 11. Egypt, Africa and the Nile Valley as an Afrocentric Dilemma
• 12. From India to Ethiopia (Kush): The Invention of the Fictitious Kushite Empire
• 13. Black Columbus and Black Natives in the New World
• 14. Conclusion
• Appendix: Josephus’ Guilt and the Afrocentric Misuse of His Account
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index