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[ the text below is a contribution by Wim van Binsbergen to a debate on Afrocentrism, published in Politique Africaine, Nov. 2000 ]
Stephen
Howe’s book[1]
is in the first place a contribution to
intellectual history, and as such it 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.
Unmistakably the author intends his book to constitute
Afrocentrism’s definitive denunciation. His motivation is
alarm over what he (with many others, foremost Mary Lefkowitz)[2] sees as the sell-out
of intellectual and moral values for the sake of Black, mainly
African American, consciousness-raising.
One cannot help agreeing with Howe’s (and Lefkowitz’s)
identification of the deficiencies endemic to that genre: the
poor scholarship; the amateurish, autodidactic approach to grand
historical and comparative themes without systematic use of
obvious sources and obvious methods; the Afrocentrist authors’
manifest and deliberate isolation from current debates and
current advances in the fields of scholarship they touch on; and
the occasional lapses into Black racism. On all these points Howe
has very sensible things to say.
However, where Howe and I fundamentally disagree is with regard
to the extent of dismission that Afrocentrism calls for. For
Howe, Afrocentrism is largely what in our Marxist days we used to
call false consciousness:
a view of reality which is systematically distorted and which can
be explained from the historical trajectory traversed, in recent
centuries, by the collectivity holding these views. Where Howe
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 (p. 6), as for me, the
central issue here is explicitly the truth value of Afrocentrism.
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, he
sadly misses the opportunity of exploring the possibly mythical
dimensions of mainstream historiography.
For Howe the truth value of Afrocentrism is zero, in other words
Afrocentrism is entirely mythical. For me,[3] very much to the
contrary, Afrocentrism (despite its endemic defects) does contain
a kernel of truth, in the form of testable hypotheses about the
possible contributions which Africans may have made towards the
world-wide development of human culture. Such a position has
important political and critical implications. For if there is
even the remotest possibility that some of the Afrocentrist
tenets (however unscholarly in their present elaboration and
substantiation) might yet be confirmed when restated in a
scholarly manner and investigated with state-of-the-art
scientific methods, then the wholesale dismissal of Afrocentrism
cannot simply be the positive, enlightened gesture Howe (or
Lefkowitz) claim it to be. Such dismissal risks to be a
confirmation of the status quo, a continuation of the processes
of exclusion to which Black people, inside and outside Africa,
have been subjected for centuries. Here there is a political 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 or
identical with those of the Afrocentrists. Martin Bernal’s
has been such a case, inevitably denounced by Howe.
Historiographic usage offers a number of ready answers to the
fundamental question: By what method and with
what validity and reliability do we construct images of the past?
For Howe, and for many historians like
him who 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 (i.e. North Atlantic, Western) everyday concepts.
Inevitably (since everyday common perspectives are by definition
intersubjective, shared with others and recognised to be so
shared) a common sense appeal would favour the paradigms as taken
for granted in a given discipline at a given moment of time.
It has been Bernal’s merit[4] to make us aware of
the immense historical and political significance of one such
historiographic paradigm, whose demolition has been the purpose
of his Black Athena
project:
(a) ‘Greek
classical culture was essentially independent from any inputs
from the Ancient Near East (Anatolia, Phoenicia, Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia)’.
In
connection with Afrocentrism, three other such historical
paradigms have been dominant throughout the second half of the
twentieth century:
(b) ‘Ancient
Egypt, although 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’
(c) ‘Ancient
Egypt did not have a
profound, lasting, and therefore traceable impact on the African
continent, particularly not on sub-Saharan Africa’
(d) ‘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’
Phrased in
this way, these paradigms, although largely taken for granted by
the scholars working in their context, are in principle testable
hypotheses. Although they are not intrinsically ideological,
unmistakably they well attuned to a hegemonic North Atlantic
perspective on the world. They postulate a world which is neatly
compartmentalised; incomparably more so 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, a whole 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 the hegemonically undesirable idea of
counter-flows in a northerly direction is ruled out. These may be
testable hypothesis, but they are very close to geopolitical
myths.
If our four paradigms (a) through (d) can be demonstrated to have
considerable 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. These
inverses would stress historical cultural continuity:
(ainverse)
between Greece and the ancient Near East including Ancient Egypt;
(binverse)
between prehistoric cultures situated on the Africa continent
south of the Tropic of Cancer (23°27’ North), and Ancient
Egypt;
(cinverse)
between Ancient Egypt and latter-day African cultures;
(dinverse)
between latter-day African cultures even regardless of the
influence of Ancient Egypt.
It is my
contention that the paradigms (ainverse) through (dinverse)
contain a healthy and serious critique of hegemonic
misconceptions, and therefore in themselves are to a considerable
extent, demonstrably true. It now so happens
that these inverse paradigms are among the central tenets of
Afrocentrism, which therefore can no longer be relegated to mere
false consciousness and Black consciousness-raising, but deserve
to be admitted to the central halls of scholarship.
To dismiss these inverse views as ‘myths’, as Howe does
in the subtitle of his book and throughout, is not only doing
them injustice, but also means myopia: the potentially mythical
nature of the dominant paradigms is insufficiently brought to the
fore.
This myopia of Howe’s book is not readily recognised since
the execution of its design is largely impeccable. Not being an
Africanist himself, he can only be praised for the meticulous way
in which he has digested the vast relevant bibliography, offering
a middle-of-the-road synthesis in line with the dominant
paradigms (a) through (d). He finds little, in the enormous
literature he has plodded through, to falsify the dominant
common-sense paradigms (a) through (d); but did he search closely
enough? To Howe, ‘the actual evidence of ideas about
kingship paralleling Egypt’s either in Sub-Saharan Africa or
in the Aegean is extremely thin’ (p. 130). On the basis of
what kind of authority is such a statement made? My own recent
discovery of very extensive Egyptian parallels in the material on
Zambian kingship[5]
came only after studying Nkoya kingship and myths for twenty
years, from the inside, and after far more extensive exposure to
Ancient Near Eastern studies than anthropologists and Africanists
normally get; this suggests some of the methodological and
paradigmatic problems involved. Contrary to what Howe claims, the
evidence on parallels between Ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan
Africa is massive, though uneven.[6]
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, their
internal counter-currents, and some of their most recent
developments. For instance, 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 scarcely fifty thousand years ago,
producing modern humans capable of language, art, symbolism,
social organisation etc., may well have taken place (in part or
entirely) in Africa, from which now hail our oldest finds of
animal representations, paint, and sophisticated weaponry like
barbed harpoons.[7] Such a probable
African background of modern humans (who, in the face of
ultraviolet exposure, may well have been black-skinned) provides
Afrocentrism with a prima facie case
too good to be ignored or dismissed of hand.
Howe’s good intentions have not prevented him from endorsing
a view of world history which is potentially hegemonic,
Eurocentric, and mythical, and which therefore is not preferable
to the Afrocentrist alternative he fights.
I will overlook Howe’s occasional lapses into polemical
overkill. More relevant is that scholarly reputations are readily
sacrificed on the altar of Howe’s indignation vis-à-vis
Afrocentrism, and the more readily, the less Howe knows of their
specialist field: Clyde Ahmad Winters, Herodotus, Henry
Frankfort, Frobenius, Sergi. 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
meant explaining the origin of the Persian wars in a complex
context encompassing the entire Ancient World, or lumping Egypt
and Mesopotamia in one grand argument, or stressing the essential
continuity between West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia,
when it comes to somatic traits, kinship patterns, languages, and
symbolism. Not surprisingly, Howe’s villains appear as
intellectual heroes in one of my own books in progress.
The case of Frobenius is particularly instructive. The leading
Africanist of his generation (early twentieth century), he became
the major single inpiration of Afrocentrism. In addition to other
allegations (some of which may be only too true but none of which
should be treated anachronistically), Howe reproaches Frobenius
(p. 116) for stressing outside influences on African cultures.
Such alleged emphasis on Frobenius’s part (which amounts to
a distortion of his work anyway) certainly does not fit in the
Afrocentrist orientation, yet is the inescapable implication of
global cultural exchanges percolating since at least the Upper
Palaeolithic. In fact, we encounter here a fifth main-stream
paradigm:
(e) ‘There
have been no substantial non-African influences on African
cultures’.
This
paradigm happens to be shared by late twentieth century
Africanists, and Afrocentrists alike. In my opinion, the
hegemonic background of the contention enshrined in this paradigm
lies in a combination of two ideological stances. In the first
place the North Atlantic tendency to an absolute othering of
things African, which does not tolerate them to be polluted by
transcontinental connections and thus to be recognised, after
all, as part of the wider world. In the second place I see here
an attempt at compensation for a guilty feeling about the
violation of African dignity in the context of the transactlantic
slave-trade and colonialism. Yet Africa has unmistakably been
part of the global world of mankind since its African origin,
both giving to the wider world, and taking from it;
transcontinental exchanges in human culture have been the
hallmark of human history, inside and outside Africa.
Let us be grateful to Howe for giving 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, 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 that, as a sign
of commitment and intellectual integrity on Howe’s part, he
was obviously pleased when, at the colloquium where the present
argument was first delivered, I stated the case for the possible
empirical truth (in ways beyond the scope of the present short
note) of some of the most cherished Afrocentrist theses. 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 has to be forced into open debate, and
will thus be cleansed from poor methodology, restrictive
selection of data, entrenched refusal to take cognisance of
existing detached scientific inquiry, and above all, racism.
Beyond the unmistakable defects of current Afrocentrism, glows
the promise of a bright future, where thanks to Afrocentrism’s
inspiring reversal of accepted hegemonic paradigms, we may hope
to come much closer to the empirical, demonstrable truth
concerning such contributions to mankind’s world-wide
culture as have emerged, over the millennia, from the African
continent.
[1]
Howe, Stephen, 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical
pasts and imagined homes, London/New York:
Verso, first published 1998.
[2]
Lefkowitz, M.R., 1996, Not out of Africa: How
Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history,
New York: Basic Books.
[3]
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black
Athena: Ten Years After, 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,
F.-X., Chrétien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., 2000, eds., Afrocentrismes:
L’histoire des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique,
Paris: Karthala, pp. 127-150; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
forthcoming, Global Bee Flight: Sub-Saharan
Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World — Beyond the Black
Athena thesis.
[4]
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; cf. his contributions to Black
Athena Ten Years After, o.c.
[5]
van Binsbergen, Global Bee Flight,
o.c.
[6]
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, espec. pp. 447f.
[7]
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:
Africa’s 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.
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