It shouldn’t.
You mean scholarship.
From here
Seems pretty self-evident to me. Is anyone going to deny this?
Anecdote: in various high school history-related classes I learned about Canadian history, Canadian politics, “Ancient Civilizations” (Rome and Greece), Modern Western (Europe), and early American literature.
Where was the history - or even a mention! - of the cradle of civilization, the origin of humans, the place with the most human history of all?
Did they figure it wasn’t relevant to me? Is it because I’m white?
(I’m pretty sure there were African descendents at my school …)
Another anecdote: a teacher friend of mine is trying to teach her students about Timbuktu and Great Zimbabwe and is being told not to because it’s not on the curriculum.
As far as I knew, until I accidentally came upon it later in life, there were no societies, no cities, no culture, nothing at all, in Africa (except Egypt). Africa had no history. It is, and (I must assume, having never heard otherwise) always has been, a massive continent full of deserts, jungles, and poor starving people. That is all we need to know.
In the last few years I have learned about Great Zimbabwe and Timbuktu, Haile Selassie and Chaka Zulu, the vast diversity of genetic and linguistic diversity on the continent of Africa, the residual, global effects of colonialism and the North Atlantic slave trade. This was all on my own initiative as it has remained largely invisible in any institutionalized history-related discussions I have been privy to.
So, my question:
Do you agree that the Afrocentrist argument, excerpted above, is a valid observation? (If your experience resembles mine, I don’t see how you could deny it.)
If so, do you think this is a problem of some kind?
It’s too easy to focus on the parts of a theory that are disagreeable or controversial (such as the debate on which historical people were actually “black”) and totally ignore other, more worthwhile aspects (such as the way Africa has been totally invisible in many people’s experience of history).
Well, generally I agree with the above sentence. Where I would disagree is with the second half…namely that Europeans denied Africa’s contribution for some nefarious reasons of their own. After all, Europeans were centrally focused on their civilization to the exclusion of ALL other peoples…not just the African’s. And, guess what? All those other peoples (including the Africans), if left to themselves, were equally inwardly focused on THEIR cultures contributions while denying others.
No, my own problem with Afrocentrism is that it attemps to one up the Europeans…by distorting things the other way. Its true that Africa has made significant contributions to world history…butsome of the claims I’ve heard from Afrocentric sources are pretty ridiculous. Its like not being content to merely show the very valid and real contributions they want to out asshole the Europeans by claiming nearly everything significant has some root in Africa (and of course that its the white European who is keeping all this information a secret…keeping the black man down, etc etc).
Now, I’ll be the first to say that my own experiences with Afrocentrism may not be the, er, mainstream. Maybe I’ve only heard from the lunitic fringe. I’m certainly willing to change my opinion about Afrocentrism if someone wants to fight my ignorance on this.
-XT
Disclosure: My exposure to “Afrocentrism” is basically summed up in the above post. I have never formally encountered it, and frankly read only the first bit of the Wikipedia article about it. So I am in no way an apologist for it, or a qualified “Afrocentrist” by any definition. But based on my experience of Africa, I am sympathetic to the idea exerpted above (that Africa has been left out of Eurocentric models of history, and that these Eurocentric models predominate in popular culture, meaning Africa has remained largely invisible) while I have little patience for parts of it represented in this thread (that it is possible/useful/relevant/remotely interesting to determine which (if any) historical figures were African, and what counts as African in this respect).
Near as I can tell, it’s an approach, not an all-explaining theory of everything. You can take and leave whatever parts of it you choose. Some loonies calling themselves “Afrocentrist” in no way invalidates whatever else it may have to offer.
I think xtisme’s criticisms above are fully valid, and if I was teaching a class on Afrocentrism (with my vast experience in the subject ;)) I would welcome such comments. I would write discussion questions like “Does Afrocentrism attempt to one up the Europeans by distorting things the other way? Are there circumstances under which this might be an effective strategy? Why/why not?”
Of course, my first class in “Theories of international development” was a deconstruction of the course title … so perhaps I would not be the most appropriate teacher for this class.
I do not think that any intelligent, rational, and informed person would deny this statement (although lots of people can argue the extent and details).
However, the next sentence in the Wiki article is
This intent (which appears to accurately describe an awful lot of Afrocentrist publications) is purely propaganda. It is not an attempt to re-examine world history to provide an accuarate balance of history, but simply a shifting of things said to make one group feel good.
There is nothing particularly disturbing about that (although it leads to the sort of jokes we told about the U.S.S.R. from WWII through the 1980s, where a Russian character in a movie claims that everything from airplanes to TVs to Hollywood were really “invented” in Russia). The problem arises when some
We already know that civilization did not have a “Nilotic origin” (although the Nile river valley played an extremely important part in nurturing Western civilization–a point that I have never seen denied–along with a claim that that Nilotic “origin” was actually the exclusive effort of sub-Saharan Africans–a point that is ludicrous).
It is, indeed, a shame that the empires that arose in the region of Mali and Zimbabwe have been so long ignored by history classes and this should be rectified. It is not a “correction,” however to pretend that the poor benighted Americans were only raised to the level of civilization by a couple of trips from Africans who then went home and lost their own civilization or in claiming that Cleopatra was a black woman despite the clear historical record.
“Objection, Your Honour, answer is non-responsive.”
*Permission to treat the defendant as a hostile witness. 
(not being a mod my permission is just about as worthless as could be of course…)
-XT
As a former history teacher during when the Afrocentrism “debate” was more frequently in the news, I would like to give my perspective.
I do think that American (and Canadian, and European) history classes have long ignored non-western history. This is not limited to Africa. Most High School and basic College level history classes ignore the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands until colonization. This seems to be for three reasons:
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Limited time and resources. Frankly, I and my students rushed through history simply because there was sooo much to cover and so little time. My students missed out on a deeper understanding of great swaths of Western History, too. I would love to spend a long period on the history of the Indian Subcontinent, but then I really couldn’t cover WWI.
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Teachers teach what they know. Few teachers are versed enough with Non-western history to feel comfortable enough to conduct a class on it.
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Many of these culture’s impact on western history during pre-colonization periods is limited. Teachers like to connect things, and it is difficult to connect some of these culture’s impact to the Western tradition mandated by the curriculum.
Afrocentrism, in it’s infancy, was a part of the “Multiculturalism” movement attempting to correct this situation. And it was a good thing. History students would get a better view, a more complete view, of their world. I saw history teachers, particularly the younger generation, make attempts to include what we could in our courses.
Somewhere along the way “Afrocentrism” has been hijacked by agenda driven political movements, many of them loony. Black Isrealite, “Mud people vs Ice people”, "Homer, Jesus & Cleopatra were black and put down by ‘the man’ " and even a few “the sphinx came from ALpha Centari” folks. The “Afrocentrism” label has gotten, in many circles, so corrupted, that many of the original followers have abandoned the label as useful.
The legitimate historians are still working away, but will often use “African Studies”, “Native Studies” or “Multicultural viewpoint” in order to be less divisive and to seperate themselves from the nuts.
Just my $0.02.
Bingo. And I am eternally grateful for the Religious Studies courses I took in undergrad surveying Far Eastern and Indian religions, or I might know practically nothing about the history of these regions prior to, say, World War II.
To think, without a Religions of India parts I&II, I might not know of the scholoarship of Max Müller, and the recognition of the common linguistic heritage of Indo-European languages. I might not know that the conquests of Alexander led to the cross-polinization of Greek philosophy and Buddhism, and the creation of Grecco-Buddhist traditions. These contacs likely played a role in begetting some of the Mahayana tradition in the East, the the Pyrrhonic school in the West, not the mention the fascinating developments in the territories in between.
The connections between what I had originally been schooled about as systems in practical isolation are so fascinating and rich I can scarcely understand why our secondary-school approach to world history largely ingores the importance, or seemingly even the existence, of these critical examples of syncretism.
Any “centrism” oversimplifies to the point of fictionalizing, IMO.
Eh. I worked with at a high school photography studio. The number one cause of returns was Asian mothers coming and and complaining that their kid’s perfectly accurate likeness was “too dark”. I’m sure they wouldn’t have the same objections if it were their housekeeper’s pictures. There are plenty of societies where it is the norm to portray yourself as a lighter than you are.
I’m not saying the ancient Egyptians were black, just that someone’s representation of themselves doesn’t necessarily tell you much about how they actually look.
YAWN. Boy, it’s late. What’d I miss?
If I had used an exclusively linguistic term like Afro-Asiatic, you’d have a point. The term “Bantu” is a perfectly accurate, though broad, ethnic description. It was never exclusively a linguistic term.
Link to my position on Afrocentrism, which has been available on this site with a simple search engine entry of my name and the word “Afrocentrism”. Assail away. Please try to be open to the stark possibility that the discipline as a whole is NOT out to falsify “this aspect of Afrocentrism” nor “anything based on it.”
Yeah, I’m claiming the ancient Egyptains were racially Negroid. Me and damn near any Afrocentrist you’d care to name. I’m a bit surprised you didn’t already know this… frankly, I thought if any one aspect of Afrocentrism were widely disseminated, its the controversies in Egyptology and the repeated challenges to the European anthropological orthodoxy that stated wll up into the 1950s “blacks are a people without a past, without civilization.” Please note that just because our interest is racial doesn’t mean it’s inherently racist. (I’m not saying th racist stuff isn’t out thre, just that it should be seen as fringe untruths incrasingly being debunked.)
I’m happy to report you suppose incorrectly. Cheikh Anta Diop was a leading Senegalese historian whose work – REPORTEDLY – (I’m still looking for evidence of this myself) included a means to test the melanin content of Egyptian mummies, back in 1960. His findings revealed that the melanin content of mummies was comparable to those of dark skinned peoples south of Sahara.
REPORTEDLY – Diop requested to use his test on the mummies of Pharoahs on display in the Cairo Museum.
REPORTEDLY – he was denied this simple request. Here the matter supposedly ends.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have seen and heard of references to Diop’s melanin dosage test over many years. However, I do not know where his findings were published (if they ever were) and why this material isn’t more widespread if it is true. Odder still, if Diop’s findings were false, it seems to me a simple matter to refute them by duplicating his methods and reporting where false evidence or wrong interpretations of data lie. However, I’ve never seen any evidence offered to debunk it as a hoax nor refute it as flawed. Until I see something otherwise, I remain cautiously optimistic this assertion of Diop’s may have some validity.
Well Diop’s test, if verified, would go quite a ways towards making that stupid little argument go away.
So what if race is an arbitrary social convention? So are “God”, “the Devil”, “Time”, “The Afterlife”, “Masculinity”, “Femininity”, “Good”, “Evil,” “They,” “We”, “Fairness”, “Faith”, “Justice”, “Patriotism”, “Culture,” “Ethnicity”, “Luck,” “Intelligence”, “Love”, “Family” and even “Equality.” All these things are arbitrarily defined – but they CAN be defined. I see most afrocentrists gaining some idea that modern notions of race can be “proven” and “decided” forensically, using DNA and tracing bloodlines. And yeah, I’d say the one drop rule is fully in effect to define blackness globally and historically. Most definitions of race do not meet or use these criteria. (This is partly the reason I’m personally more comfortable using the term ethnicity and linking language, geography, culture and genetics.)
Arbitrarily dismissing someone else’s standards as somehow inaccurate and illegitimate is just narrow-minded and bigoted. I know a lot of people have a personal stake in the logical order of the universe as something ultimately explainable, defineable, replicable and material, but there’s lots of abstract concepts out there that rule our lives. Science doesn’t explain everything. It’s not bullshit to LOOK at someone, or a group of someones, or a society of someones, and make a judgment about their “race,” even if you don’t quote unquote believe in the concept of race. People who DO believe in the concepts have definite ideas about what constitute them and what doesn’t. We’ve heard Eurocentric views. Afrocentric ones aren’t that bizarre.
Afrocentrism is a lot of things, but it’s not a pseudoscience. tomendebb has it half right describing it as pure propaganda (its been evolving out of that for some time and this thread has been waaaaAAAaay too focussed on the less credible African studies) but does a HUGE disservice to other afrocentric historians who do attempt a balance of perspective and a redress of decades of racist attitudes from white historians, and increasingly, racist black ones, too.
The way most history I’ve been exposed to is taught?.. it IS propaganda. All of it deserves criticism. Especially Hollywood productions of history that insist the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews looked like Liz Taylor, Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston.
Nava. I don’t know why fringe afrocentrists are getting all the airtime. The whole of black history does not begin and end with G.M. James, Maulena Karenga, the Nation of Islam, Yosef ben-Johanssen, Five Percenter lyricists, or even the Wu Tang Clan. You want some more credible afrocentrists? Here’s a few:
Marcus Garvey
John Henrik Clark
W.E.B DuBois.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Cornell West.
Cheika Anta Diop.
Carter G. Woodson.
Molefi Kente Asante.
Ivan Van Sertima.
J.A. Rodgers.
Chancellor Williams
John Hope Franklin
Asa Hilliard
Reloy. ThaaaaaaaaAAAAaaaaak you for seein’ it and sayin’ it.
**Loopydude. ** I agree. But all centrisms tend to get… enthusiastic.
even sven. That’s okay… I’m sayin’ the ancient Egyptians were black. If any’d shown up in Selma, Alabama in the forties, they’d have to ride the back of the bus. I also believe waaaaaaaay too much has been made of “representative” art “not really reflecting how they look.”
Well, from your link:
From the Encyclopædia Britannica “Bantu Peoples”:
So we start out with your site’s really sloppy use of “ethnic” (the Xhosa and the Zulu simply cannot be grouped together as an ethnic identity) and find that any other references to Bantu identifies it as a linguisitic group (e.g., East Africa Living Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Britannica, etc.). If you are going to throw out terms in uncommon or irregular ways, you really need to identify your alternative definitions when you do it.
Beyond that, of course, your own sources contradict the claim that I challenged. The Living Africa page to which you linked (and I have quoted) places the origins of the Bantu (speaking) people in Cameroon in 1,000 B.C.E., a supposition supported by the Britannica and others. Unfortunately, this places the Bantu over 1,500 miles west of Upper Egypt over 2,000 years after Egypt had been established as a thriving culture with successive societies.
If you are concerned that this thread has concentrated too much on the loons, then it would have behooved you to stick around to defend those who are less loony. Attacking the study of History based on Hollywood won’t get you much traction–few posters are going to accept Hollywood’s version of events in any event. (And complaining about Liz Taylor not being representative of Egyptians or Hebrews indicates an ignorance that she was playing a Macedonian/Greek–not that she looks particularly Greek, but your complaint was that she did not look Egyptian).
On the other hand, if you believe that all history is merely propaganda, then you do yourself a disservice. It is the loons who treat history as merely propaganda who will doom the movement. When a kid who has been raised to believe that “Negroid” cultures created and disseminated all civilization runs into the demonstrable fact that the Egyptians borrowed heavily from the Sumerian and successor states of southwest Asia, the thinking student will begin to question everything else learned in Afrocentric courses and the unthinking student will be dismissed by society at large as one more loon. It would seem to me that building history on facts would both present a corrective to current Western popular culture while innoculating Afrocentrism against future attacks that would shatter its (already tenuous) credibility.
So when does Asiacentrism get a look in? Or Austrocentrism?
I didn’t get taught a lot of African history when I was at school. I went to school in England, and was taught English history, for the most part (and not all of that either - just the bits that were on the syllabus). I was taught in the US for a bit too, so I’ve been taught some US history. My girlfriend, on the other hand, grew up in Scotland, so got taught Scottish history. She knows very little about what an English person would consider easy general knowledge. She’d also never heard of The Mayflower until very recently - a case for Americentrism to be taught in Scotland?
As Reloy3 said, teachers like to be able to link things together. Most of the history one learns at school is of the country or area in which you live. This is so that you can understand how it’s linked to your current life, and how your country ended up the way it is.
At the risk of using a strawman, the history of Egypt 4000 years ago, and how it influenced Greek civilisation, is too tenuous to be taught at school. I remember learning a bit about the Romans - far later, and they actually were in Britain - and I found it hard to see the relevance to me at the time. I certainly don’t think that historians should ignore the importance of Egyptian civilisation - I just don’t think that we need to worry that it’s not on school syllabuses.
The question of colour / race is not an important one to me. I don’t think that debating the skin colour of a historical person is an important use of time - it shouldn’t matter what colour their skin was. That’s the whole point. I should be able to identify with and respect someone regardless of their skin colour, so if Cleopatra was black (and fat), it doesn’t make any difference to her importance in history.
But then, I’m a young, white, middle-class male.
I’m glad he’s on your list. I was going to mention his “Blacks In Science” in the GQ thread about African civilizations.
Tom, I don’t agree with your assessment that Bantu is a linguistic more than an ethnic qualifier. It’s both. For example, there’s been a lot of question lately about the Bantu refugees from Somalia. See a cite here. For example: “The Bantu people are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Somali nomads and the coastal people, who generally disdain agriculture and value a tribal lineage system that does not include the Bantu.” Some of these Bantu have retained their original languages from Eastern and Southern Africa, but some haven’t: “Many Bantu from the middle Juba River valley have lost their east African language and culture.”
It still seems to be based on one’s language, however. We see similar cases in which people refer to “Germanic” peoples invading the Roman Empire, where there were numerous separate tribes from widely flung locations whose only common trait was a similarity of language in contrast to the Latin spoken by the empire.
Regardless how it is used to identify factions in the chaos of Somalia, today, it still does nothing to describe the people who founded Upper Egypt (to say nothing of Lower Egypt) in the general period around 4000 - 3000 B.C.E. when it is pretty well established that the Bantu actually formed on the West Coast of Africa around 1000 B.C.E.
Were the Badarians or Naqaba “black” as we would identify the term? It would not surprise me. It would also not surprise me to discover they were not. That region has been a migration crossroads since well before any historical period and my guess, (based on pure speculation) is that any DNA testing we perform on the inhabitants of the Nile Valley is going to produced very muddled results.
Anyway, it’s a side issue. As Askia said, “Not all Africa’s Negroids are of Bantu stock” and he also says he’s using the term in a broad sense. Not much room for reproach there.
I think it’s plain that the lunatic fringe gets all the attention because they sell the most papers. And also they’re most easily dupes if there are any malicious Eurocentrics out there, which there may well be.
Full disclosure: I took a class with Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena, years ago. Who can know where the truth lies, but his description of his treatment at the hands of the Cornell Classics department was disturbing at best.
And regardless of the true origins of Hellenistic culture, can anyone really argue that Eurocentrism doesn’t have a lot to answer for? I mean, think of Hegel for example, with his Zeitgeist moving steadily Westward from the tired and stagnant savages of the Orient to the pinnacle of rationality – the whiteys!
I’ll also note that in my extrememly ill-informed and casual review of the debate over the years, those railing against Afrocentrism just seem so petty about it, gnashing their teeth and rending their garments that we’re losing the Western canon! When the practical effect on campuses of a more multicultural view is students are actually starting to find out that the absolutely unsupportable view taught to their parents about how all the virtues of civilization and democracy evolved isn’t exactly the truth. Broadening horizons can’t be a bad thing, I think.
–Cliffy
Can’t we all agree that Africa is that country where safaris happen, and people use that clikly langauge. I am sure if something else happened there we would have all known about it already.
Hopefully thats a joke.
-XT