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Stephen Howes book Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes[2] is in the first place a conbtribution to intellectual history, and as such I can only have admiration for the writer and his product. The book is an excellent piece of scholarship. Its breadth of argument and the depth of reading supporting it, are most impressive. Afrocentrism is one of the first books to map out in detail, from its remoter origins to its contemporary ramifications and high profile manifestations, one of the most significant intellectual and political movements of the world today. It is no longer unique. For instance, recent French work has greatly added to our understanding of Cheikh Anta Diop and of Afrocentrist movements in general;[3] and where Howes book spends one substantial chapter on the Black Athena debate as initiated by Martin Bernal, there is a fast growing literature of writings[4] which largely converge, and in part go beyond, the largely sensible things Howe has to say on this Afrocentrism-related topic. But even so, Howes book is deservedly a standard work and will remain so for years to come.
However, Stephen Howe was a political activist before he materialised as a high-ranking academic writer, and his book despite its unmistakable academic qualities is less a contribution to detached scholarship than an instance of political polemics. Its aim is not only to depict the Afrocentrist movement and to trace its trajectory through the last two centuries of intellectual and political global history, but also to pass an intellectual, political and moral judgement on that movement. Unmistakably the author intends his book to constitute Afrocentrisms definitive denunciation. His primary motivation is profound alarm over what he (with many others, foremost Mary Lefkowitz)[5] sees as the sell-out of intellectual and moral values merely for the sake of Black, mainly African American, consciousness-raising. The underlying reasoning is something like: should we allow the standards of scholarship to be abandoned merely for the sake of letting a few African Americans forget slavery and the Black ghetto? If historical truth, intellectual and pedagogic integrity, the canons of logic and proof are to be violated for the sake of the boosting of Black identity, then Afrocentrism is among greatest contemporary threats to mankind, at a par perhaps with environmental destruction, or AIDS. Exposing Afrocentrism would be every intellectuals duty, and Howe leads the way.
If one is familiar with current Afrocentrist writings one cannot help being aware (just as aware as Howe turns out to be) of the deficiencies which are endemic to that genre: the poor scholarship; the amateurish and autodidactic approach to grand historical and comparative themes without systematic use of obvious sources and obvious methods;[6] the Afrocentrist authors manifest and deliberate isolation from current debates and current advances in the fields of scholarship they touch on; and the tendency yet by no means universal among Afrocentrists towards Black racism. On all these points Howe has extremely sensible things to say. He parades well-chosen and convincing examples of these ills of Afrocentrism. I for one find myself in agreement with much of the details of his writing. I particularly admire his uncompromising stance[7] against any introduction of race-based arguments in decent academic debate a weakness by which Afrocentrists, and Bernal, often embarrass their otherwise most sympathetic readers.
However, where Howe and I fundamentally disagree is with regard to the extent of dismission that Afrocentrism calls for. Howes book ends with a note of tragedy: how regrettable that the paradoxes of the modern global history of Black people have ended them up with such a collection of deeply cherished untruths as constitutes Afrocentrism. For him, Afrocentrism is largely what in our Marxist days we used to call false consciousness: a systematically mistaken view of reality which can be explained from the historical trajectory traversed, in recent centuries, by the collectivity (mainly African Americans, but also an increasing number of Africans) holding these views. Where he finds Afrocentrism by and large intolerable it is because, in the context of the politics of identity on which the postmodern world revolves, it is no longer politically correct, yea it is more and more even politically impossible, to publicly ignore or dismiss the Afrocentrist claims; hence their increasing influence in the U.S.A. educational system. For Howe,[8] as for me, the central issue here is explicitly the truth value of Afrocentrism.
Interestingly, Howe asserts himself as one primarily interested in the politics of history writing, but he fails to elaborate on the formidable philosophical question of what constitutes truth in historical analysis. If yet he insists on calling the Afrocentric version of history, mythical (obviously reserving the claim to non-mythical truth for the non-Afrocentrist history of his own favourite brand, he sadly misses the opportunity of exploring the possibly mythical dimensions of mainstream historiography. In the present argument I shall briefly outline what I see as the mythical, specifically hegemonic, potential of mainstream North Atlantic hsitory, as confronted by Afrocentrism; but obviously this is not the context to pursue the philosophical implications any further.
In fact, Howes special expertise in British anticolonial politics, a thoroughly documented modern topic, renders him apparently immune for he dynamics of the production of African history, where it is not so much unequivocally documented facts which inform the writing of history, but often[9] the permutation of theoretical models in the light of marginally available shred of factual evidence, including oblique mythical statements which might or might not contain a kernal of hsitorical truth. In such a context, the distinction between truth and myth is far less evident than Howe suggests. Let us be heedful of the following assertion by the nestor of African History in his critique of Luc de Heusch:
All history as reconstruction of the past is of course mythical.[10] Myths are held to be true. De Heusch is to be faulted for not using all[11] the traditions about the past, however recent that past, and considering them myth. But, conversely, historical accounts reflect the past. The well-known problem is to find exactly how a set of data reflects the past as well as how it expresses the present. The succeeding problem, then, is how to reconstruct the past most objectively, and in doing so create a new myth. Not because the account is not true, but because it will be held to be true.[12]
For Howe the truth value of Afrocentrism is zero, in other words Afrocentrism is entirely mythical. For me,[13] on the other hand, Afrocentrism has admittedly all the defects summed up above, but it also contains a kernel of truth, in the form of an elaborate set of testable hypotheses about the possible contributions which the inhabitants of the land mass we have come to call Africa, may have made towards the world-wide development of human culture. And I would go further: if there is even the remotest possibility that only a mere handful of the Afrocentrist tenets, however unscholarly in their present elaboration and substantiation, might yet be confirmed in part when restated in a scholarly manner and investigated with state-of-the-art scientific methods, then the dismissal of Afrocentrism cannot simply be the positive, enlightened gesture it claims to be. Such dismissal would then turn out to be a confirmation of the status quo, a continuation of the processes of exclusion to which Black people, inside and outside the African land mass, have been subjected for centuries. Here there is a strategic role to be played by the odd person out: the scholar and polemicist who for lack of Black or African antecedents cannot be suspected of being on a mere conscious-raising trip, and who yet, for respectable scholarly reasons, defends views similar to of identical with those of the Afrocentrists. Martin Bernals has been such a case, and inevitably there have been numerous attempts (not all of them totally unconvincing) to deny his integrity, to emphasise the differences between himself and the certified, Black Afrocentrists, and to demolish his scholarship and the conclusions to which it has led him; however, there have also been voices vindicating Bernal and urging that his research initiatives be carried on.[14]
My own case is formally similar to Bernals although the scope of my scholarship and my public exposure are so much more limited as to make the comparison an imposition on my part. I am a European born, light-skinned scholar who for thirty years has conducted research on and around Africa, both localising and comparative, both synchronic social scientific and historical. For the past ten years I have effectively combined this identity as a North Atlantic empirical social scientist with that of an African-initiated diviner-priest; and for the past three years with that of an academic philosopher, exploring interculturality as the key to the globalising world of today. Socially and ethnically I have no reason to pose as an Afrocentrist, but emotionally, spiritually and scientifically that is what I have become. In my recent academic work, therefore, it has been my central concern to thresh testable scientific hypotheses out of the ideological and otherwise defective writings of the Afrocentrists, and put these hypotheses to the test; I have been struck by the also for me unexpectedly great extent to which their empirical truth would appear to be confirmed.
Around 1990, during field-work in Francistown, Botswana, my personal itinerary from poet and ethnographer to intercultural philosopher would take me to a further exploration of the relativity of cultural specificity. In that year I became a Southern African diviner-priest, a sangoma. In the process I acquired the mysterious rough wooden tablets of the sangoma oracle, consecrated in the blood of my sacrificial goats and periodically revived by immersion in rain water and by the application of the fat of these animals. They seemed to represent the epitome of strictly local cultural particularism. It was as if they had risen from the village society of Southern Africa at some indefinite Primordial Age, and the same seemed to apply to the interpretation scheme which names the sixteen specific combinations which may be formed by the tablets when these are ritually cast. The local oracle of four tablets had been described by missionaries as long ago as four hundred years.[15] The old woman like a stone, the old male witch like an axe, itching pubic hair like a young womans, the uvula like a youthful penis this is how the four tablets are named, and their various combinations have connotations of witchcraft, ancestors, taboos, sacrificial dances, and all varieties of local animal totems. What could be more authentic and more African? Not for nothing had I, at the time, described my initiation (which, after mor ethan twenty years of work as a religious and medical anthropologist, made me an accomplished and recognized specialist in an African divination and therapy system) as
the end point of a quest to the heart of Africas symbolic culture.[16]
Now I had to admit that this
romantic suggestion of extreme locality was a mere illusion,
under which lurked a reality which had enormous consequences for
my theoretical and existential stance as an ethnographer and a
world citizen. The interpretational scheme, right up to the
nomenclature of the sixteen combinations, turned out to be an
adaptation of tenth-century (C.E.) Arabian magic, with a Chinese
iconography (consisting, just like I Ching, out of configurations
of whole and broken lines), and at the same time astrological
implication such as had been elaborated another fifteen or twenty
centuries earlier, in Babylonia. The local cultural orientation
in which the inhabitants of Francistown had entrenched
themselves, and from which I initially felt painfully excluded,
turned out not to be at all the incarnation of absolute and
unbridgeable otherness, but -- just like my own cultural
orientation as a North Atlantic scholar -- a distant offshoot of
the civilisations of the Ancient Near East, and like my own
branch of science it turned out to have been effectively
fertilised by an earlier offshoot from the same stem: the Arabian
civilisation.[17]
I had struggled with the other, as if it were
an unassailable, utterly alien totality; but parts of it turned
out, on second thoughts, to be familiar and kindred, and
available for appropriation.
This amounted to a head-on collision with the central theory of classic cultural anthropology since the 1930s: the historical and cultural specificity of distinct, for instance African, societies, the assumption of their being closed onto themselves and bounded, of their having a unique internal integration and systematics, and in general the idea that something like a culture exists.
This insight was for me the trigger to start a comprehensive research project, which has meanwhile resulted, among other publications, in an edited collection Black Athena: Ten Years After,[18] on the work of Martin Bernal, and a book manuscript entitled Global Bee Flight: Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt and the World: Beyond the Black Athena thesis.
The latter study is based on a similar Through the looking-glass (Lewis Carroll) experience as I had in connection with the Francistown divination system. A few years ago I went through my various articles on western Zambian kingship in order to collect these in a single volume. This was shortly after I has spent a year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in 1994-95, as the only anthropological member of the Working Group on Magic and religion in the Ancient Near East. After this extensive exposure my eye was suddenly and totally unexpectedly caught by the many specific and profound parallels between the ceremonies and mythologies surrounding Nkoya kingship in South Central Africa, and Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. The parallels were so striking, so detailed, that I had to seriously consider the possibility of cultural diffusion from these various regions towards South Central Africa -- once again the suggestion of continuities in space and time across thousands of kilometres and across several millennia.
The Francistown divination system and Nkoya kingship are two concrete examples of the kind of serendipities -- totally unexpected finds -- of cultural convergence and diffusion across the entire Old World, which have occupied a central place in my empirical research since 1990. But there is also a more systematic source of inspiration: the anthropological fieldwork which I have undertaken over the past thirty years in various locations on the African continent. In combination with the scholarly literature, with discussions with my colleagues, and with my involvement in the work of my Leiden colleagues and of my research students, these researches have created a context for comparative hypotheses suggesting considerable correspondences between local cultural orientations, far beyond the strictly local and presentist horizons of classic ethnography.
Against this background I immediately recognised a kindred spirit in Martin Bernal, the author of the multi-volume book Black Athena.[19]
Bernal intends to expose the Eurocentrism which -- as he demonstrates -- has been at the roots of the study of Graeco-Roman Antiquity over the past two centuries. In Bernals opinion the idea of being heirs to the genial Greek civilisation, allegedly without roots in any previous non-European civilisation, has played a major role in the justification of European intercontinental imperialism. His central thesis is that we must recognise the African and Asiatic roots of classical Greek civilisation (especially its philosophy and religion) -- and in doing so, we would also recognise the non-European roots of major cultural orientations in todays North Atlantic civilisation, which is increasingly becoming global anyway. Hence the pragmatic title of Bernals magnum opus, Black Athena: this title is to indicate that the goddess Athena, although the central symbol of classical Greek civilisation, yet had an origin outside Europe, in Africa. The question is not without interest for philosophers for the principal stake in the Black Athena debate is the claim concerning the non-European origin of the European philosophical tradition.[20]
With Black Athena: Ten Years After (1997) I reopened the debate on Bernals work, which appeared to be effectively closed after the devastatingly critical Black Athena Revisited[21] With the new book, Global Bee Flight, I return to Africa in order to investigate the implication of the Black Athena thesis for our Africa research today and the implication of our Africa research for the Black Athena thesis. Because Ancient Egypt occupies a key position in the debates on Africas cultural historical relation to Europe and to the rest of the world, a massive section of Global Bee Flight is occupied by an analysis of the mutual interpenetration of Ancient Egyptian and sub-Sahara-African themes, in the way of concepts and structures of thought, myths, symbolism, the kingship, state formation, and productive practices. One absolutely surprising outcome of the book (when I started out I sincerely thought I could prove the opposite to be true!) is my confirmation, without the slightest reservation, of one of the most ridiculed ideas of early twentieth century anthropological diffusionism: Egyptocentrism as a model for African cultural history. By the end of the fourth millennium before the common era, Ancient Egypt owed its emergence as a civilisation (contrary to what Bernal thinks to be the case) to the interaction between Black African and Eastern Mediterranean cultural orientations. But as a next step my analyses demonstrates that Ancient Egypt, in its turn, did have a decisive fertilising effect not only (as stressed in the Black Athena thesis) on the eastern Mediterranean basin and hence on Europe, but also, in a most significant feed-back process, on Black Africa, right into the nooks and crannies of many aspects of life, including the kingship, law, ritual and mythology.[22] In stead of the familiar image of mutually absolutely distinct cultures, as in the dominant view both among scholars and in the modern world at large, what thus emerges in the image of Africa which displays a very remarkable cultural unity, not for any mystique of Africanity, but as a result of clearly detectable historical processes: as first a principal source and subsequently as a principal recipient of Ancient Egyptian civilisation, and finally as a result of converging Arabian/Islamic as well as - in the most recent centuries -- North Atlantic colonial influences. The general conclusion of Global Bee Flight is a radical, positive and unexpected revision of our conception of the place of Africa in global cultural history. Meanwhile there is little reason why no the same model of qualified continuity over large distances in space and time would not also apply to other continents including Europe, and to the historical connections between these other continents.
Meanwhile it is strange that the argument of convergence has met with so little acceptance on the part of African philosophers today. Instead they virtually unanimously support the argument of cultural diversity. In the words of Kwame Appiah, one of Howes intellectual heroes and someone under frequent attack from Afrocentrists:
If we could have traveled through Africas many cultures in (...) [precolonial times] from the small groups of Bushman hunter-gatherers, with their stone-age materials, to the Hausa kingdoms, rich in worked metal we should have felt in every place profoundly different impulses, ideas, and forms of life. To speak of an African identity in the nineteenth century if an identity is a coalescence of mutually responsive (if sometimes conflicting) modes of conduct, habits of thought, and patterns of evaluation; in short, a coherent kind of human social psychology would have been to give to aery nothing a local habitation and a name. [23]
In line with this stress on precolonial fragmentation lies the African philosophers Kaphagawanis thesis on C4, which is a scientistic formula meant to express
the Contemporary Confluence of
Cultures on the Continent of Africa. This is a postcolonial
phenomenon where different cultures meet and mingle to form
new, hybrid forms.[24]
In this formulation the emphasis on a plurality of mutually distinct and bounded cultures is indeed does give way to a recognition of greater unity, but extreme multiplicity and fragmentation is still held to be the hallmark of the African past, the point of departure. Such unity between African cultures as is being recognised is taken to be the result of the postcolonial phenomenon of globalisation, which allows this view to salvage the concept of a pristine distinctness of a great number of precolonial cultures in Africa. The entire discussion on Afrocentrism (with its Senegalese precursor Cheikh Anta Diop) appears to be lost on the majority of contemporary African philosophers. Afrocentrists are scarcely welcomed or cited in the circles of academic African philosophers.
Underlying these excursions in space and time is a more fundamental questions which takes is right back to the very heart of Howes argument: By what method and with what validity and reliability do we construct images of the past? This question is obviously relevant to Howes argument, to which he came, as he states himself, not as an Africanist but as one interested in the politics of history writing.
Historiographic usage offers a number of ready answers to this question. For Howe, and for many historians who like him situate themselves in the empiricist tradition while being suspicious of an over-reliance on systematic theory, a central methodological approach is that of common sense, an appeal to the self-validating effect of simple everyday logic and common everyday concepts. Inevitably (since everyday common perspectives are eminently intersubjective, shared with others and recognised to be so shared) a common sense appeal would favour the paradigm which is in fashion in a given discipline at a given moment of time. One such paradigm has been
(a) the virtual independence of Greek classical culture from any inputs from the Ancient Near East (Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolia),
although this view was admittedly coming under attack even before Bernal. Three other such paradigms, dominant throughout the second half of the twentieth century, have been:
(b) the assertion that Ancient Egypt did not have a profound, lasting, and therefore traceable impact on the African continent, particularly not on sub-Saharan Africa (interestingly, Egyptocentrism often in the trappings of the Hamitic thesis[25] which claimed sub-Saharan Africa to be the passive recipient of cultural innovations coming in from a West Asiatic culture carried by people who lacked the somatic features common among contemporary Africans was a major Africanist paradigm in the first half of the 20th century);
(c) the assertion that contemporary Africa is a patchwork quilt of numerous distinct local cultures, each supported by a distinct language and each giving rise to a distinct ethnic identity, in the light of which broad perspectives on continental cultural continuity going back to the remoter past much be relegated to the realm of ideology and illusion (again earlier work, e.g. that of Frobenius predating the structural-functional obsession with fieldwork in one narrow local setting), would stress far more African continuity in space and time)
(d) the assertion (also with overtones of the Hamitic thesis) that Ancient Egypt, although fortuitously situated on the edge of the African continent, was essentially a non-African civilisation whose major achievements in the fields of religion, social, political and military organisation, architecture and other crafts, the sciences etc., were largely original and whose historical cultural indebtedness lay, if anything, with West Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa.
Phrased in this way, these paradigms have nothing intrinsically ideological about them; they are in principle testable hypotheses, and so are their inverses, which would stress historical cultural continuity
(ainverse) between Greece and the ancient Near East including Ancient Egypt;
(binverse) between Ancient Egypt and latter-day African cultures;
(cinverse) between latter-day African cultures even regardless of the influence of Ancient Egypt;
(dinverse) and between prehistoric cultures situated on the African land mass south of the Tropic of Cancer,[26] and Ancient Egypt.
Although the above paradigmatic statements (a) through (d) are not intrinsically ideological, unmistakably they are far better attuned to a hegemonic North Atlantic perspective on the world than their inverses. Paradigms (a) through (d) postulate a world which is neatly compartmentalised; incomparably more compartmentalised than would be suggested not only by the globalising experience of our own time, but also by the demonstrable spread of agricultural techniques, weaponry, musical instruments, languages, belief systems including world religions, formal systems such as board games, divination methods, myths and symbolism, across the African continent and in considerable (though painfully understudied) continuity with the rest of the Old World, and even the New World. Under such compartmentalisation, an entire mythical geopolitics comes into being: the mystery and mystique of Europe more recently: of the North Atlantic in general can be maintained as a solid ideological power base for colonialism and postcolonial hegemony; Egypt, Africa, African cultures, remain the ultimate other, to the North Atlantic, but also to one another; a conceptual and geopolitical divide and rule keeps them in their subordinate place vis-à-vis the North Atlantic; and the basic flow of achievement is defined as going from north to south, while hegemonically undesirable idea of counter-flows in a northerly direction are ruled out. These may be testable hypothesis, but they are very close to geopolitical myths.
If our four paradigms (a) through (d) can easily be demonstrated to be saturated with hegemonic ideological potential (not to say that they are downright Eurocentric and racist) , their inverses are likely to have a similar but opposite ideological charge. If (a) through (d) are so ideological as to be probably untrue to a considerable extent, the same might be the case for (ainverse) through (dinverse), but it is far more likely that the latter contain a healthy and serious critique of hegemonic misconceptions, and therefor in themselves are to a considerable extent, demonstrably true. To dismiss these inverse views myth, as Howe does in the subtitle of his book, is not only doing them injustice, but also means that the potentially mythical nature of the dominant paradigms is insufficiently realised.
It now so happens that (ainverse) through (dinverse) are among the most central tenets of Afrocentrism, which therefore can no longer be relegated to false consciousness and Black consciousness-raising, but deserve to be admitted to the central halls of scholarship. It is not in the Black ghetto or in its academic counterparts (such as the Journal of African Civilizations and Karnak Publishers, both bastions of Afrocentrism), but in the open, transparent, universally accessible environment of academia itself, that Afrocentrism will be forced to enter into open debate, and can be cleansed from bad methodology, restrictive selection of data, entrenched refusal to take cognisance of existing detached scientific inquiry, and above all, racism.
However scholarly, therefore, and however driven by justified irritation at a lowering of widely accepted standards of academic, pedagogic and political conduct, Howes book is myopic. It does not recognise the implicitly, potential, or (as far as I am concerned) unmistakable, hegemonic nature of the paradigms (including (a) through (d) as above) which it propounds. It can afford to ignore this state of affairs, since the execution of its design is largely impeccable. Not being an Africanist himself, Howe can only be praised for the meticulous way in which he has digested the vast relevant bibliography. He finds little, in the enormous literature he has plodded through, to falsify the paradigms (a) through (d). Black Athena is a slogan just as false to history as is White Egypt.[27] To Howe, the actual evidence of ideas about kingshiop paralleling Egypts either in Sub-Saharan Africa or in the Aegean is extremely thin,[28] despite a massive literature (partly consulted by Howe), of which I shall only quote the following counter-opinion, as prhased by the prominent, non-Afreocentrist Meroe specialist Shinnie:
But having said all this, it can be seen that, here and there, there are strong resemblances to Egyptian objects and to Egyptian culture scattered throughout Africa. In the realm of material culture a small number of objects have been found which might reasonably be supposed to have originated from Egypt. Amongst these are musical instruments such as the small harp used by the Azande and other peoples of the southern Sudan and Uganda, wooden headrests in various parts of the continent, certain types of sandals, and many other similar objects. In West Africa attentian has been drawn to the use of ostrich-feather fans, very similar to pharaonic ones, in Wadai and Bagirmi and other places in the neighbourhood of Lake Chad. (...)
In other parts of West Africa, particularly Nigeria, there are resemblances in the regalia of chiefs to the pharaonic regalia - whips, crooks, and flails have all been reported and ome have seen them as direct borrowings from Egupt.
The god Shango, of the Yoruba, whose sacred animal is the ram, has been derived by some from the god Amun, and Wainwright[29] has cited a ram-headed breastplate from Lagos which certainly very strongly suggests an Egyptian influence.
(...)
Seligman, taking the existence of such a [ divine ] king, or for some peoples the custom of king-killing, as an indication, suggests Egyptian influence at work amongst such diverse peoples as the Dinka and Shilluk of the Upper Nile, the Banyoro and Baganda of the Great Lakes, the Jukun of Nigeria, and the Bambara of the Western Sudan.
The only one of these where the case of for Egyptian influence looks at all convincing is amongst the Banyoro, where he draws attention to two significant features:
1. The male members of the royal family are related to the eagle, though there is no eagle clan. Seligman suggests this is a memory of the Egyptian Pharaohs membership of the falcon clan.
2. The custom of the King of Bunyoro shooting the nations by bow and arrow, which he claims resembles the Egyptian sed festival.
Personal investigations have also shown that there is a ceremonial digging-up of the ground by the king at his accession, a custom which also has its Egyptian counterpart.
The royal family of Bunyoro have strong traditions of having come from the north, and in the royal enclosure at Hoima maintain a carefully attended clump of papyrus as a reminder of their Nilotic origin.
All this does suggest, however remotely, Egyptian influences. Yet the Bunyoro royal line cnnot have reached its present home more than a few hundred years ago and, as Seligman himself obserbed, this makes Egyptian influence unlikely, it being just as probable that these traditions are due to old and widespread African beliefs which affected Egypt as they have affected other parts of Africa.[30]
To Howe, Nubia appears not as a corridor between sub-Saharan Africa and Ancient Egypt,[31] but remains a forbidding boundary, in line with the dominant paradigm cited above but at deviance with some available specialist readings of the archaeological evidence. For all these statements impressive amounts of secondary sources are paraded. But Howe has simply not spend enough time in the various disciplines his argument touched up, nor looked closely enough once he was there. He misses the feel of the disciplines involved[32] and of their most recent developments. Thus the African origin of mankind is dismissively glossed over in chapter III, but hardly a word here on recent discoveries which have added, to the now generally accepted view that humanisation took place in Africa some three million years ago, the rapidly increasing probability that also the Human Revolution of only fifty thousand years ago, producing modern humans capable of language, art, symbolism, social organisation etc., may well have taken place in Africa, from which now hail our oldest finds of animal representation, paint, sophisticated weaponry like barbed harpoons.[33] Such a probable African background of modern humans (who, for reasons of ultraviolent ray protection, may well have been black-skinned) provides Afrocentrism with a prima facie case too good to be ignored or dismissed of hand.
Howe is insufficiently aware of research work now in progress and not yet available in published and canonised books, and his good intentions cannot prevent him from implicitly endorsing a view of world history which is potentially hegemonic, Eurocentric, mythical, and probably demonstrably incorrect.
That Howe is ideologically far from neutral is suggested by his style of writing. Far too frequently his good intentions are overtaken by his polemic stance.
When he refers to the collectivity of Afrocentrists as a posse (a mindless group of henchmen relentlessly pursuing their adversary at the orders of an authoritarian leader)[34] or a pack (a noun usually reserved for a collectivity of non-humans, specifically canines), the boundaries of good taste and decency appear to be crossed. This is also the case when, out of sheer philosophical ignorance, the idea of possible African alternatives to binary logic has to be caustically dismissed.[35] Likewise the nostalgic or proud adoption of African and Egyptian names by Afrocentric writers has to be ridiculed by Stephen Howe, as if it incomparably more rational that twentieth century parents, like his own, call their children after a early Christian martyr...[36]
Scholarly reputations are also readily sacrificed on the altar of Howes indignation vis-à-vis Afrocentrism, and the more readily, the less Howe knows of their specialist field. The synthetic, programmatic overview of Afrocentrism by Clyde Ahmad Winters is sarcastically dismissed, but no attention is paid to that same writers intriguing linguistic work, published in authoritative international journals, tracing linguistic parallels between West African languages, Asian, and native American contexts, and suggesting an unexpected Asian dimension to the global African presence challenging all accepted geopolitical wisdom.[37] Inevitably, and in rather facile a manner, Herodotus is paraded[38] in the all too familiar manner as the Father of Lies, whereas more recent reassessment of the amazing extent of objective hsitoriocal fact in Herodotus is ignored.[39] Henry Frankfort, who was one of the greatest Egyptologists[40] and Assyriologists of his generation (less than half a century ago), and whose books still rate as lasting standard works among the specialists, is denounced as outdated. Frobenius, one of the greatest Africanists of his generation (early twentieth century) who has been the main single intellectual influence upon Afrocentrism,[41] is depicted as of negligible intellectual capabilities, of damaging influence even on European Africanism, hardly taken seriously by the specialists, and an art thief to boot.[42] Sergi, a highly original physical anthropologist of the early twentieth century, is filed by Howe as merely long-forgotten and academically discredited.[43]
What Howe does not realise is that all these ancient and modern
scholars have one thing in common, which makes them unwelcome in
the common-sense, main-steam paradigmatic world to whose
authority Howe appeals. They all had the ability to think across
established cultural and geopolitical boundaries, whether this
means discerning African linguistic traits in Asia (Winters),
explaining the origin of the Persian wars in a complex context
encompassing the entire Ancient World (Herodotus), or lumping
Egypt and Mesopotamia in one grand argument (Frankforts Kingship
and the gods),[44]
or stressing the essential continuity between West Africa, North
Africa, and Europe, when it comes to kinship somatic traits,[45] kinship patterns and
symbolism.[46]
Not surprisingly, Howes villains appear as intellectual
heros in one of my own books in progress.[47]
The case of Frobenius is particularly instructive. In addition to other allegations (some of which may be only too true but none of which should be treated anachronistically), Howe reproaches Frobenius[48] for stressing outside influences on African cultures. Such emphasis on Frobeniuss part certainly does not fit in with the Afrocentrist orientation, yet is the inescapable implication of global cultural exchanges percolating since at least the Upper Palaeolithic. In fact, the contention which dogmatically denies non-African influences on African cultures could be presented as a fifth mainstream paradigm, but one that happens to be adopted by the Afrocentrists too. In my opinion, the hegemonic background of this contention lies in a combination of two ideological stances: the North Atlantic tendency to an absolute othering of things African, which does not tolerate to be polluted by transcontinental connections; and the compensation for a guilty feeling about the violation of African dignity in the context of the transactlantic slave-trade and colonialism: After all that happened, let us at least grant Africans the right to their own unadulterated identity. Yet Africa has been part of the world since the origin of mankind; and transcontinental exchanges in human culture have been the hallmark of human history, also as far as Africa is concerned.[49]
I chose a question as the title of this paper: Is there a future for Afrocentrism after the book by Stephen Howe? It is time for an answer.
Let us be grateful to Howe for having given us a serious
scholarly study of the background and contents of Afrocentrism as
a case of intellectual history. His devastating political and
ideological critique of Afrocentrism has been inspired by the
best of intentions, by concern not only for the future of
scholarship and education but also by abhorrence at the thought
of Black intellectuals retreating into an intellectual ghetto.
Contrary to Bernal, who tends to be right for the wrong reasons,[50] Howe can be said to
be wrong for the right reasons. His book does not put paid to
Afrocentrism; and I am pleased to report, as a sign of profound
commitment and intellectual integrity on Howes part, that
he was obviously pleased when at the conference where the present
paper was originally delivered, I stated the case for the
possible empirical truth of some of the most cherished
Afrocentrist theses. Beyond the racism, the bad scholarship, and
the entrenched intellectual isolationism as admittedly negative
features of current Afrocentrism, glows the promise of a bright
future, where thanks to Afrocentrisms inspiring reversal of
accepted hegemonic paradigms, we may hope to come much closer to
the empirical, demonstrable truth concerning such contributions
to mankinds world-wide culture as have emerged, over the
millennia, from the African continent.
[1]
An oral version of this paper was presented at the Colloque sur lAfrocentrisme,
Centre de Recherches Africaines, Université de Paris I
(Sorbonne), 2nd May 2000; I am grateful to Richard Banégas,
François-Xavier Fauvelle, Claude-Hélène Perrot, and the
journal Politique Africaine for
their invitation; and to Stephen Howe for a generous response,
and for hours of friendship spent together in Paris.
[2]
Howe, Stephen, 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical
pasts and imagined homes, London/New York:
Verso, first published 1998.
[3]
Fauvelle, F.-X., 1996, LAfrique de
Cheikh Anta Diop, Paris: Karthala;
Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrétien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H.,
2000, eds., Afrocentrismes: Lhistoire
des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique,
Paris: Karthala
[4]
Cf. Lefkowitz, M.R., & MacLean Rogers, G., eds, 1996, Black
Athena revisited, Chapel Hill & London:
University of North Carolina Press; and far more positively
towards Bernal: Berlinerblau, J., 1999, Heresy
in the University: The Black Athena controvery and the
responsibilities of American intellectuals,
New Brunswick etc.: Rutgers University Press.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1996, Black Athena and Africas contribution
to global cultural history, Quest
Philosophical Discussions: An International African
Journal of Philosophy, 1996, 9, 2 / 10, 1:
100-137; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black
Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch
Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue, Talanta:
Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society,
vols 28-29, 1996-97, now being reprinted in expanded form as Black
Athena Alive, Hamburg/Muenster: LIT Verlag,
2001; also cf. W.M.J. van Binsbergen, 2000, Dans le
troisième millénaire avec Black Athena?, in:
Fauvelle-Aymar et al., Afrocentrismes,
o.c., pp. 127-150.
[5]
Lefkowitz, M.R., 1996, Not out of Africa: How
Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history,
New York: Basic Books. In addition to their shared views of
Afrocentrism and Black Athena
(cf. Howe, Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 9f), there is a
very striking literal parallel between Lefkowitz and Howe: both
present, aneccdotically, the picturesk detail of their dismal
conversation with an Afrocentrist Black girl student, who in
Lefkowitzs case claims for a fact that Socrates was Black
(Lefkowitz, M.R., 1996, Ancient history, modern myths,
in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, Black
Athena revisited, o.c.,
pp. 3-23; p. 3), in Howes case (Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. viii) turns out to be ignorant of
centuries of West African gold mining and trading. One can only
wonder why the combination of Black, female, and ignorant would
be so irresistable and infuriating at the same time, to both
writers.
[6]
Yet dismissive statements of this nature need to be made with the
greatest care. E.g. when Howe declares that no Arocentrist has
ever done a serious study opf an African society (neither has
Howe), he contradict himself when discussing (Howe, Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 219) The
Rebirth of African Civilization by the later
Afrocentrist Chancellor Williams (Washinton D.C., 1961), as
precisely such a study.
[7]
E.g. Howe, Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 112 n. 9, 226.
[8]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 6.
[9]
With some but not total exaggeration; cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1981, Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory
studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul
International; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Tears
of Rain: Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia,
London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
[10]
Original footnote deleted.
[11]
Original emphasis.
[12]
Vansina, J., 1983, Is elegance proof? Structuralism and
African history, History in Africa,
10: 307-348, p. 342.
[13]
van Binsbergen, Black Athena: Ten Years After,
o.c.; Dans le
troisième millénaire, o.c.;
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming, Global
Bee Flight: Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World
Beyond the Black Athena thesis.
[14]
Cf. footnote 5.
[15]
Cf. Santos, J. dos, 1901, Ethiopia oriental, and Eastern
Ethiopia, in: Theal, G.M., ed., Records
of South Eastern Africa, Cape Town:
Government of the Cape Colony, vii, pp. 1-182 [reprint of the
original edition of 1609], 183-383 [English translation ].
[16]
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, Becoming a sangoma: Religious
anthropological field-work in Francistown, Botswana, Journal
of Religion in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344, p.
314.
[17]
Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, Divinatie met vier tabletten:
Medische technologie in Zuidelijk Afrika, in: van der
Geest, J.D.M., ten Have, P., Nijhoff, G., en Verbeek-Heida, P.,
red., De macht der dingen: Medische
technologie in cultureel perspectief,
Amsterdam: Spinhuis, pp. 61-110; Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995,
Four-tablet divination as trans-regional medical technology
in Southern Africa, Journal of Religion
in Africa, 25, 2: 114-140; Van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1996, Transregional and historical connections of
four-tablet divination in Southern Africa, Journal
of Religion in Africa, 26, 1: 2-29; Van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, The astrological origin of
Islamic geomancy, paper read at The Society for the Study
of Islamic Philosophy and Science/ Society of Ancient Greek
Philosophy 15th Annual Conference: Global and
Multicultural Dimensions of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and
Social Thought: Africana, Christian, Greek, Islamic, Jewish,
Indigenous and Asian Traditions, Binghamton
University, New York, Department of Philosophy/ Center for
Medieval and Renaissance studies; Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996,
Time, space and history in African divination and
board-games, in: Tiemersma, D., & Oosterling, H.A.F.,
red., Time and temporality in intercultural
perspective: Studies presented to Heinz Kimmerle,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 105-125; Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., in press,
Board-games and divination in global cultural history: A
theoretical, comparative and historical perspective on mankala
and geomancy in Africa and Asia, in: Finkel, I., red., Ancient
board-games, Londen: British Museum
Publications; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, Islam as a
constitutive factor in so-called African traditional religion and
culture: The evidence from geomantic divination, mankala
boardgames, ecstatic religion, and musical instruments,
paper for the conference on Transformation processes and
Islam in Africa, African Studies Centre and Institute for
the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, 15 October, 1999,
forthcoming in: Breedveld, A., van Santen, J., & van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., eds., Islam and
transformations in Africa.
[18]
o.c.
[19]
Bernal, M., 1987, Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, I, The fabrication
of ancient Greece 1787-1987, Londen: Free
Association Books/New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press;
Bernal, M., 1991, Black Athena: The
Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization, II, The
archaeological and documentary evidence,
Londen: Free Association Books/New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press.
[20]
Bernal, Black Athena,
I, o.c.;
Burkert, W., 1992, The orientalizing
revolution: Near Eastern influence on Greek culture in the Early
Archaic Age, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, originally published as: Die
orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und
Literatur, Heidelberg: Winter; Evangeliou,
C., 1994, When Greece met Africa: The genesis
of Hellenic philosophy, Binghamton:
Institute of Global Studies; James, G.G.M., 1973, Stolen
legacy: The Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, but
the people of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians,
San Francisco: Julian Richardson Associates, first edition New
York: Philosophical Library, 1954; Lefkowitz, M.R., 1996, Not
out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as
history, New York: Basic Books; Palter, R.,
1996, Black Athena, Afrocentrism, and the history of
science, in: Lefkowitz, M.R., & MacLean Rogers, G.,
ed., Black Athena revisited,
Chapel Hill & Londen: University of North Carolina Press, pp.
209-266; Preus, A., 1992, Greek Philosophy:
Egyptian origins, Binghamton: Institute of
Global Cultural Studies; West, M.L., 1971, Early
Greek philosophy and the Orient, Oxford:
Clarendon.
[21]
Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, Black Athena
revisited, o.c.
[22]
With reference to the work of the Senegalese natural scientist
and cultural philosopher C.A. Diop, more than with reference to
Bernals work (which he does not like any more than he does
Diops; cf. Appiah, K.A., 1993, Europe upside down:
Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism, Times
Literary Supplement, 12 february, pp.
24-25), Appiah rejects the idea of such a continuity, on the
grounds of two self-evidences which however are untenable in the
light of recent historical research: the claim that Ancient Egypt
had only a non-specialised philosophy (a point reiterated by
Howe), which moreover is unrelated, in substance, with current
African cultural orientations; and the claim that we cannot
expect to find, in Africa, cultural continuities extending over a
period of three or more millennia a mere restatement of
the dominant paradigm (c) as discussed below. Appiah, In
my fathers house, o.c.,
p. 161f.
[23]
Appiah, In my fathers house,
o.c., p. 174; cited in
approval in: Bell, R.H., 1997, Understanding African
philosophy from a non-African point of view: An exercise in
cross-cultural philosophy, in: Eze, Postcolonial
African philosophy, o.c.,
pp. 197-220, p. 218f, n. 29.
[24]
Kaphagawani & Malherbe, African epistemology, o.c.,
p. 209.
[25]
Cf. Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 115f.
[26]
23°27 North.
[27]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 4; I would endorse, however, much of Howes
middle-of-the-road criticism of Bernals position, based as
usual on extensive reading of the literature on the Black
Athena debate. I would however shrink from
calling Bernal a theorist, like Howe does (Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 8); my reasons
for this are presented extensively in my Black
Athena Ten Years After: Towards a
constructive re-assessment, o.c.
[28]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 130. On p. 173 he cites approvingly the opinion of the
anthropologist Benjamin Ray not to be confused with the
Egyptologist John Ray according to whose non-specialist
opinion not a single Egyptian artifact has ever been found in
Sub-Sahran East Africa (Ray, B.C., 1991, Myth,
Ritual and Kingship in Buganda, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, p. 196); alas, by the rules of
falsificatory logic one counter example is enough to disprove
this claim: Breuil, H., 1951, Further details of
rock-paintings and other discoveries. 1. The painted rock Chez
Tae, Leribe, Basutoland, 2. A new type of rock-painting
from the region of Aroab, South-West Africa, 3. Egyptian bronze
found in Central Congo, South African
Archaeological Bulletin, 4: 46-50.
[29]
Wainwright, G.A., 1949, Pharaonic survivals, Lake Chad to
the west coast, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology, 35: 167 -75; Wainwright had
been a major Egyptologist for decades when he began to explore,
towards the end of his career, Egyptian influences in sub-Saharan
Africa.
[30]
Shinnie, P. L., 1971. The legacy to Africa, in:
Harris, J.R., ed., The legacy of Egypt,
2d ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 434-55, p.p. 447f.
[31]
Cf. Adams, W.Y., 1984, Nubia: Corridor to
Africa, Princeton: Princeton University
Press/London: Lane, first published 1977. For the crucial extent
of interior African influences upon the formation and symbolism
of first-dynasty Egyptian kingship, cf. Williams, B.B., 1986, The
A-group Royal Cemetery at Qustul. Cemetery L: Excavations between
Abu Simbel and the Sudan frontier, in: Keith
C. Seele, Director, Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition volume
III, Part 1, Chicago: Oriental Institute; Williams, B.B., 1996,
The Qustul Incense Burner and the Case for a Nubian origin
of Ancient Egyptian Kingship, in: Celenko, T., ed., Egypt
in Africa, Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum
of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, pp. 95-97.
Without being aware of this, Howe (Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 140) discusses
these findings in a way biased by the dominant, Northern-centred
and anti-continuity paradigms. That John Iliffe, an excellent
modern historian of East Africa but without the slightest
authority on ancient Egypt-African relations, writes that Egypt
was remarkably unsuccessful in transmitting its culture to the
rest of the continent (Iliffe, J., 1995, Africans:
The history of a continent, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 26; cf Howe, Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 146) should
have been appreciated by Howe as another mere restatement of the
dominant paradigm, and not as an independent, authoritative,
empirical conclusion in its own right.
[32]
For instance, with the sheer difficulty of mastering the relevant
scripts and languages, the century-old backlog in publishing
primary materials, and the incredibly small number of
Egyptologists and Assyriologists in the world (less than a
thousand), and their disciplines rather too successful
insulation from the rapid turnover of theoretical paradigms
(functionalism, structuralism, marxism, postmodernism) which
since the early twentieth century have affected most other
provinces of academia, the rate of obsolescence of intellectual
products in Egyptology and Assyriology is far slower than Howe
takes for granted (e.g. Howe, Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 225) on the
basis of his personal experience with such fields as political
and intellectual history, African Studies, etc.
[33]
Shreeve, J., 1996, The Neandertal enigma?
Solving the mystery of modern human origins,
New York: Morrow/ Viking, pp. 216f, 257f; Deacon, H. J., 1992,
Southern Africa and Modern Human Origins, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London,
B 337 (1992): 177-183; Deacon, H. & J. Deacon, 1999, Human
beginnings in South Africa, Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone
Age, Altamira Press: Walnut Creek CA; Anati,
E., 1999, La religion des origines,
Paris: Bayard; French translation of La
religione delle origini, n.p.: Edizione
delle origini, 1995, pp. 88f; Anati, E., 1986, The Rock Art
of Tanzania and the East African Sequence, BCSP
[ Bolletino des Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici ]
, 23: 15-68, fig. 5-51; Wendt, W.E., 1976, Art
mobilier from Apollo 11 Cave, South West Africa:
Africas oldest dated works of art, South
African Archaeological Bulletin, 31: 5-11.
In recent months, I have explored the Afrocentric implications of
these finds as part of a book manuscript entitled Cupmarks,
stellar maps, and mankala board-games: An archaeological and
Africanist excusrsin into Palaeolithic world-views.
[34]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 282
[35]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 249; cf. Cooper, D.E., 1975, Alternative logic in
primitive thought , Man, n.s., 10:
238-256; Durkheim, E., & M. Mauss, 1973 (1903), The
social genesis of logical operations, in: Douglas, M., ed,
., Rules & meanings,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 32; Salmon, M.H., 1978, Do
Azande and Nuer use a non-standard logic?, Man,
n.s., 13: 444-454.
[36]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 247f
[37]
Winters, C.A., 1977, The influence of the Mande scripts on
ancient American Writing systems, Bulletin
de lIFAN, T39, serie b, no2,
(1977): 941-967; Winters, C.A., 1983, Possible Relationship
between the Manding and Japanese, Papers
in Japanese Linguistics, 9: 151-158;
Winters, C.A., 1984, A Note on Tokharian and Meroitic,
Meroitic Newsletter/Bulletin dInformation
Meroitiques, 13 (June 1984): 18-21; Winters,
C.A., 1984, The genetic Unity between the Dravidian ,
Elamite, Manding and Sumerian Languages,
P[roceedings] Sixth ISAS [International Symposium of Asian
Studies ] , 1984, (Hong Kong:Asian Research
Service, 1985d), pp. 1413-1425; Winters, C.A., 1986, Dravidian
and Magyar/ Hungarian, International
Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 15, no 2.
[38]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 152f.
[39]
Spiegelberg, W., 1927, The Credibility of
Herodotus Account of Egypt in the Light of the Egyptian
Monuments, Oxford: Blackwell; Pritchett, K.
1993, The Liar School of Herodotos,
Amsterdam: Gieben; Bernal, Black Athena, I,
o.c.
[40]
The measure of Howes expertise in the field of Egyptology
is indicated by the fact that (albeit on what he claims to be the
authority of the non-Egyptologist Michael Mann) he
indiscriminately writes (Howe, Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 126) Maat
and Macat for the
well-known goddess of good measure and equilibrium, mistaking in
the latter version of the word the glottal stop for a c.
More importantly, Howe (Afrocentrism,
o.c., p. 127) sees
Ancient Egypts achievements mainly in the spiritual and
moral field, ignoring what Egypt gave the world in terms of
hydraulic engineering, political organisation, agriculture, myth,
culture, law and science... This is not the kind of expertise
that should sit in judgement over the specifics of Bernals
work on Graeco-Egyptian cultural and linguistic interrelations.
[41]
Abiola Irele, F., 1997, Negritude, in: Middleton,
J.M., 1997, ed., Encyclopaedia of Africa
south of the Sahara, 4 vols., New York:
Scribners, vol. 3, pp. 278-286, p. 281. The founding father of
French prehistory, the abbé Breuil, a formidable scholar in his
time but of course by now considered as obsolescent, would never
have stooped to collaborate with Frobenius if he had not been
convinced of the latters stature: Frobenius, L., &
Breuil, H., 1931, Afrique,
Paris: Cahiers de lArt. For the decisive impact
(admittedly, not always for the best) of Frobenius on German
African Studies, cf. Haberland, E., ed., 1973, Leo
Frobenius 1873-1973, Wiesbaden: Steiner;
Jensen, A.E., , 1938/40, Leo Frobenius Leben und
Werk, Paideuma, 1:
45-58; Luig, U., 1982, ed., Leo
Frobenius: Vom Schreibtisch zum Äquator. Afrikanische Reisen,
Frankfurt a.M.; Streck, B., 1995, Leo Frobenius (1873-1938)In:
Frobenius L., Masques,
Editions Dapper (Publications No. 23) Paris 1995; Streck, B.,
1996, Frobenius, Deutsche
Biographische Enzyklopädie 3. München
(1996): 499f; Vajda, L., 1973, Leo Frobenius heute, Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie, 98: 19-29. One of the
weaknesses of Howes approach is that his academic frame of
reference is almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon/Enlgish.
[42]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 167f.
[43]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 34 n. 9, cf. p. 46; unfortunately Howe leaves the reader to
guess at the details of Sergis downfall.
[44]
Frankfort, H., 1948, Kingship and the Gods: A
study of Ancient Near Eastern religion as the integration of
society and nature, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press; French translation: La
royauté et les dieux: Intégration de la société à la nature
dans la religion de lancien Proche Orient,
Paris: Payot.
[45]
Sergi, G., 1901, The mediterranean race: A
study of the origin of European peoples,
London: Scott; first published as La stirpe mediterranea, 1895.
[46]
Frobenius, L., 1923, Vom Kulturreich des
Festlandes, Berlin: Volksverband der
Bücherfreunde, Wegweiser-Verlag; Frobenius, L., 1929, Monumenta
terrarum, Frankfurt a. Main:
Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie; Frobenius, L., 1931, Erythräa:
Länder und Zeiten des heiligen Königsmordes,
Berlin/Zürich: Atlantis-Verlag; Frobenius, L., 1954, Kulturgeschichte
Afrikas, Zürich: Phaidon; first published
Vienna, 1933.
[47]
van Binsbergen, Global Bee Flight,
o.c.
[48]
Howe, Afrocentrism, o.c.,
p. 116.
[49]
For elaborate empirical examples of transcontinental cultural
influences upon African cultures, cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1997, Rethinking Africas contribution to global
cultural history: Lessons from a comparative historical analysis
of mankala board-games and geomantic divination, in: van
Binsbergen, Black Athena: Ten Years After,
o.c., pp. 221-254; and
the literature mentioned in note 17.
[50]
This is the assessment by an anonymous reviewer in the
authoritative journal Antiquity,
12/1991: 981; cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, Black
Athena Ten Years After: Towards a constructive re-assessment,
in: van Binsbergen, Black Athena: Ten Years
After, o.c.,
pp. 11-64, p. 62f.
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