Lochdale. Clearly the existence of the Sahara has helped evolve distinctive cultures, ethnic groups, religions, languages, etc. But to Afrocentrists, this means bumpkus about common bloodlines or probable cultural origins. Afrocentrists tend to not view North Africa or the Middle East as separate from the rest of Africa as many Westerners tend to do, nor do they parse differences in Afro-Asiatic languages.
So: Semetic peoples not Sub-Sharan? Completely agree. Semetic peoples not sharing any common ancestral ties to black Africans? Well, I’m open to proof from learned people on both sides on that debate with a heaping dollop of my own skepticism.
Yeah, you’re right that going back that far is problematic for Eurocentric Western historians, but Afrocentrists insist on their view is just as legitimate as those people who’ve shaped the world using Eurocentric terminology and the inherent bigotry of Mercator maps. Now, I personally have a problem with some specific Afrocentric claims but not necessarily a given general premise.
Taking a step back, I certainly agree with what you are saying vis-a-vis the idea of Africa as a whole. However, let’s cut to the chase, most Afrocentrists try to equate Semetic and other north African peoples as synonomous with sub-Saharan Africans which simply isn’t right. Morever, this isn’t about Eurocentric historians but the notion that somehow the achievments of northern African’s can somehow be attributed to sub-Saharan Africans despite a total lack of historical precedence to justify such a connection.
To the Afrocentrist it isn’t enough to highlight an African achievement, they need to then ascribe said achievement to the sub-Saharan African when there may be no such connection. That’s intellectually and historically dishonest. The Semetic peoples camed from the Middle-East and unless you want to state that because we all evolved from Africa that we are all “black” (as we currently use that term) then there really is no solid basis for Afro-centric teaching.
**Lochdale… ** well… yeah. Synonymous is fair. Afrocentrists ignore the Sahara Desert as a significant cultural divider and claim kinship with all sorts of North Africans as mixed raced peoples because of the one-drop rule, and just as black as you would consider the Hausa or Zulu. Personally, I don’t see why that’s so damningly wrong. The one-drop rule is useful for showing how a still-active doctrine that was devised for marginalizing a specific peoples can be shown to apply to all kinds of geographically diverse and historical figures-- present, past, Biblical antiquity and prehistory.
I think kinship is the word I’ve been struggling to come up with to describe this phenomenon. Kinship is often more about feeling connected than actual connectedness anyway. In reality, many blacks will find that “all my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk” but that still doesn’t stop them from claiming Pan-African unity anyway.
Regarding your other point, it depends on the exact claims being made whether or not there is a lack of historical precedence or probablity of a connection.
There are severe problems with the methodologies and conclusions of some Afrocentrists. Trust me: I know probably know them better than you what the more crackpot theories are regarding the spiritual properties of melanin and blacks having denser muscles and the Iceman Inheritance! However, I believe there is nothing wrong in theory with teaching history, science, math, cultural traditions, geography and geopolitical relationships from an emphasis on Pan-African achievement or from an Afrocentric perspective, as I firmly believe you can be pro-ethnic without being anti-other-ethnicities. The discipline needs much more rigor and careful re-examination of some basic premises and data-gathering methods, but it’s not entirely bankrupt. Certainly a scholar like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is more reputable than, say, the man born Elijah Poole.
To clarify, my phrasing of “what we would consider black” was not meant to say anything about the one-drop rule (which is exceedingly silly, incidentally, since humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa, but that’s a completely different point). The reason I used that phrasing is that race is primarily a sociological construct, not a genetic or geographic one, and those socialogical constructs would not have existed in the same form during Shakespeare’s day, or the Punic Wars, or Biblical times. Othello was not black, in so far as “black” didn’t exist as a category at the time. There were other categories related to “black”, such as “moor” (what Othello was identified as). So rather than asking, “Was Othello black?”, the proper question would be “Would Othello be considered black today?”.
Meanwhile, Askia, I’m a bit confused by your references to “the Middle East and the rest of Africa”. So far as I know, the only country considered “Middle East” on the African continent is Egypt. Are you arguing that the Arabian peninsula, Turkey, and southwest Asia are part of Africa? I can accept the claim that there are cultural ties there (certainly between North Africa and the Middle East; I don’t know enough to speak about cultural ties with sub-Saharan Africa), but geographically, they’re different continents.
Chronos. Gotcha. “Was Othello Black?” “Would Othello be considered black?” These are important distinctions. An even more pertinent query might be, “Could Othello and Desdemona get a room together in Alabama in 1945?”
In theory-- the one drop rule sounds extreme and untenable, but in daily practice in America, it usually doesn’t get scrutinized much beyond an individual being, say, one sixteenth black. If either of your grandparents were even octaroon, you’re black.
Oh, yes. Afrocentrists claim ancient kinship with peoples eastward of Egypt – into Arabia, into Turkey, into the Indian subcontinent and down over the ocean into aboriginal Austrailia. Claiming the whole of the Arabian peninsula as land-mass of Africa is roughly analogous to The United States’ annexation of the western territories as Manifest Destiny: if it’s not actual fact, it’s a goal. As for the notion that the Middle East and Africa are geographically different continents, well – according to whom, exactly? Their topographical similarities would point otherwise. The Middle East sits on a junction and its referred by Eurocentric standards to be connected to Asia. A Mercator map makes this split seem obvious, but a Peters projection map calls that into question.
In any case it’s a bit like Texas in America. Is the state essentially Western or Southern? It’s in the middle of both, and its history, cultural traditions and people can rightly be seen as either – or both. But to say Texas is exlusively one and not the other seems dumb, much as claiming the Middle East is an Asian peninsula and not African is kinda dumb.
And on a globe, it’s pretty clear that the connection between Arabia and Africa is much narrower than that between Arabia and Asia. The only reason it’s not apparent on a Peters projection is because the Peters projection horribly distorts distances. To put it another way, nobody’s ever tried to dig a canal from the Mediterranean or the Black Sea through to the Persian Gulf. Like I said, for all I know it might make sense to consider Africa and the Middle East as a single unit culturally (which should after all be more important), but not geographically.
And I’m slightly hoist by my own petard, incidentally. I said above that humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa, but that’s not quite true. More accurately, humans originated south of what would later become the Sahara desert.
I think they are so damningly wrong because the connection is tenous as to make it intellectually untenable. The Phonecian and Egyptian kingdoms had a lot more in common with southern European and middle-Eastern peoples and cultures than they did with any sub-Saharan African cultures. And by a lot more I mean that they were an off-shoot of these peoples and cultures and had next to nothing in common with, for example, the Zulu culture.
This isn’t to say that I disagree with your application of the one-drop rule and your clever way of ridiculing it!
Heh, spend some time with Irish-Americans!
Kinship is onething though but to teach that, for example, because Hannibal was born on the continent of Africa he has some connection to let’s say the Zulu nation is ludicrious. It’s like suggesting that the Irish can claim Michaelangelo because he was born in Europe and was a Catholic.
I’ll have to defer to your superior knowledge in this area as I am by no means an expert on Afro-centrism. I would enjoy learning a little more about sub-Saharan African culture and politics. Any suggested reading?
I think you need to be very careful about a Pan-African approach to history particularly if it minimizes or even rejects the overwhelming evidence of Middle-Eastern and European influences.
Lochdale. Thanks. I was pretty happy with the Ivory Soap example and the crack about the Sperm of God Himself.
I’m much more knowledgeable of African-American history than African history – but I am learning. I own a few photoessay books on Algerian Sahara, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and various African mask art books about Benin, Ibo, Yoruba and Mali’s Songhai Empires (My name, Askia, is the heriditary title of a line of Muslim Songhai kings.) I haven’t tackled Africa’s geopolitical problems yet… I need to read more on the pre-Transatlantic slave trade African cultures first, then move up to modern times.
Two good concise reference to own is John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: the History of African Americans, which I first bought in college, and Henry Louis Gates’ desk volume Africana. One of these days when I can afford it I plan to buy the multi-volume Africana. Hopefully I’ll learn how mainstream some other Pan-African claims of Indian and Austrailian kinship with East Africa are.