descendants of the numerous Nubian troops drafted into Egyptian armies, that are described as ‘black-skinned and [with] woolly hair’. Yet Herodotus immediately goes on to qualify his surmises as ‘amount[ing] to but little, since several other nations are so too.’ Elsewhere, writing about Egyptian funeral customs, Herodotus makes it clear that when Egyptians ‘lose a relative, [they] let their beards and the hair on their heads grow long’ (2: 36; my emphasis). While remarking that Egyptians were darker than Greeks, nowhere in the Histories does Herodotus regard them as either Negroid or ‘kinky-haired’.
Yet President Mbeki’s ‘irrefutable facts’ are now also the gospel truths of a militant Afrocentrist academic enterprise that has established its own orthodoxies, despite the fact that such tenets have been comprehensively discredited by scholarly research (Howe, 1998; Shavit, 2001), as well as by informed African opinion – Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks of ‘a cultural brew as noxious as any currently available in popular culture’ (1993, 24). When in June 2005 National Geographic published the reconstructed face of Tutankhamun on its front cover, as well as an article detailing the scientific care and forensic expertise that had yielded an image of a pharaoh who was quite obviously not Negroid African (Williams, 2005), the response was immediate. ‘This misrepresentation of King Tutankhamun as pale skinned and ski nosed is once again an effort to Europeanize Egypt’, fumed one correspondent (Oct. 2005: Forum). Behind such reactions lie several decades of a revanchist Africanist discourse that is relevant here as a further indication of how controversies over the possession of African history and culture have unfolded; and how they continue to make the attempt to source Western conceptions of Africa and Africans ever more controversial.
As early as the 1950s, the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop averred as an article of faith that ‘Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization…. The ancient Egyptians were Negroes’ (1954, xiv), and such claims have become the received wisdom of the African-American academy (Noguera, 1976; Asante, 1988). Such ideologies did not arise in a vacuum. They are contingent on the recuperative zeal that came to inspire Africanist historiography as it emerged from the colonial era. In the United States in particular, such convictions have been an inevitable and burgeoning product of the revisionary zeal inherent in African-American biblical discourse ever since the early nineteenth century. Colin Kidd speaks of ‘a Black vindicationist hermeneutic which reject[s] out of hand the corrupting whiteness of white Christianity’ (2006, 248), and therefore, what is regarded as its endemically biased historiography. We shall return to Afrocentrism.
Such views have also been the inevitable outcome of both the isolation in which African history has customarily been pursued, and the binarist manichaean drive that has imbued its Africanist narratives from the start. Indeed, the isolation of the history of Africa from that of the rest of the world seems at times to have been fostered by authors from both outside and inside the continent, producing startling conundrums. So, for instance, S. Davis’s Race-relations in Ancient Egypt (1951) is silent about relations between Egyptians and other Africans, concentrating instead on Greeks, Romans and Hebrews. Jonathan M. Hall’s Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997) is solely concerned with the Greeks’ sense of their own identity. Books with inviting titles such as Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt (Goudriaan, 1988), The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Isaac, 2004) or Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (Hartog, 1996) typically make no or minimal reference to Africa, Ethiopians, or black people. Leading surveys such as Charles Freeman’s Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (1996) habitually fail to list Ethiopia, Nubia or Meroë in their indices. Benjamin Isaac, purporting to write on the origins of Mediterranean racism, side-steps the crucial theme of black-white relations in the period with the excuse that black Africans ‘did not form much of an actual presence in the Greek and Roman worlds’ (2004, 49), and in any case had had a largely ‘mythical’ status in the classical mind (50). The modern mind boggles.
Yet Africanist historiography has also habitually fostered isolationist agendas. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre published his essay ‘Black Orpheus’, which called upon French-African writers to let themselves be heard. As the introduction to Leopold Senghor’s influential Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre (1948), it served as a rallying call for a new generation of African (and Africanist) writers. Authors such as Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono and Aimé Césaire would promote negritude as a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in opposition to and indeed as a denial of the European intellectual world, now disqualified, in their view, by its scandalous burden of colonialist and ethnocentric legacies (Mudimbe, 1988).
Such a stark division came to be regarded as the only legitimate response to the ‘experience [of slavery] that has defined and appears to continue to shape our [i.e., black people’s] relationship with the rest of the world. It is the one single experience that binds all Black people together’; thus the ‘sense in which every Black writer is an exile’ (Ogude, 1981, 21–22).
The full dimensions of this ‘Black Aesthetic’ and the evolution of its exclusionist aspects over the last half-century cannot be explored here, but we may note that an African-American academic as prominent as Henry Louis Gates Jr, while claiming to reject binarist notions of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ or negritude, in 1987 still espoused the legacy of exclusivist thinking in arguing for ‘our own [aesthetic] theories …, black, text-specific theories’, and in insisting that black people learn ‘to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix’ (1987, xxi). Such sentiments continue to yield astonishing claims of an Africanist essentialism that would hardly be tolerated if applied to a Western postmodernist world now. Thus Abiola Irele, expounding ‘The African Imagination’, claims for it ‘a special dimension’ that has ‘imparted to black expression a particular tonality’ that conveys ‘an African belonging that commands the vision of an entire people regarding their place in the world’ (1990, 53).
Lurking behind such beliefs is a racial essentialism and ethnocentric logic that, ironically, simply reverses the manifestations of white European racism that for so many centuries discounted African people. At a graphic level, it ‘posits the existence of a basic divisional line across the Southern Sahara: to the north of this line, one finds white peoples and non-African ways of thinking; to the south, one finds the Black race and African ways of thinking’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, 118). We shall witness the blight of such perceptions in the chapters to come.
These have become the orthodoxies of a dialectic initiated by Senghor and Sartre – even though Sartre is also on record as having come out with the extraordinary statement that ‘there is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information’ (1948, 47). The truth is that Sartre was not fundamentally interested in an emancipatory ‘Black Aesthetic’ or an emergent African liberationist militancy. One of his inspirations, however, was Frantz Fanon, and in Fanon we come to a figure and a way of looking at Africa and Africans that continue to have far-reaching implications, not only for any study of European images of Africa (such as mine), but also for any understanding of the ways in which both the revisionist Western discourse of Africa, as well as an Africanist counter-discourse, have unfolded (Young, 1995; Read, 1996; Irele, 2001; Loomba, 2002). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s tribute of 1991 captures the intensity of the impact as well as the evolving objectives of what might be called the Fanonist enterprise: ‘Frantz Fanon became the prophet of the struggle to move the centre [of the universe from Europe to Africa], and his book, The Wretched of the Earth [1961, trans. 1964], became a kind of Bible among the African students from East, West and South Africa’ (1991, 198).
Fanon’s version of Africa and the colonial encounter was, of course, no less dependent on an image of Africa than any other, and not necessarily closer to the ‘truth’ of colonialism than were the biases it sought to displace. Yet Fanonist pronouncements such as ‘the black man is the white man’s fear of himself’ or ‘the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man’ (1952/1959, 161) have reverberated down the decades of postcolonialist critique in credos such as R.S. Khare’s: ‘The Other, like the self, is an irreducible cognitive template
