Afrocentricity, Multiculturalism, and Black AthenaRobert W Wallace

The Afrocentric movement now influential in North American primary andsecondary schools is arguably the most important and challenging developmentin higher education since the curricular reforms of the nineteen-sixties 1. This move­ment is currently informed by two different and contrasting orientations: multi­cultural, and what may be called »Afro-Hellenic». In its multicultural orientation,Afrocentrism is grounded in ethnic and cultural diversity, within the frameworkof contemporary society. By contrast, »Afro-Hellenism», which attributes to Africamany of the accomplishments traditionally associated with the ancient Greeks,is abstract, intellectual, and grounded in the traditional orientations of Westerncivilization. The argument of this essay is that Afro-Hellenism is in fact, as it seems,paradoxical. As a proposition it is difficult to defend on historical grounds. As apolitical concept it is retrograde and counterproductive.

The movement toward multiculturalism in the United States is in part theresult of increased immigration to the U.S. especially from Central America, theCaribbean and Southeast Asia. It is also, in part, the result of conflicting attitudestoward non-whites felt by many white Americans: attitudes that continue to ref­lect an element of racism, excluding non-whites from full partidpation in Americansociety despite ideologies of the »melting pot. »Racism remains an issue not leastin primary and secondary education. When American public schools began tobe desegregated in the 1960s, many Southern whites left these schools to estab­lish private» academies», often called»Christian» , as for example (in a communityI know) the «Liberty Christian Academy». Extraordinarily, »Christian» is a codeword, meaning that blacks are not welcome. In 1980, although blacks constitutedonly 10 percent of the American population, more than two thirds ofblack childrenattended schools that were more than 50% black. In integrated schools thesechildren are often treated poorly, placed in remedial sections or tracked into voca­tional areas. Racism, of course, also remains a factor in American society general­ly. A recent book has argued that in fact most white Americans are affected byracist thinking, believing (for example) that blacks are probably intellectuallyinferior to whites 2. In part as a consequence of racism, America has not beenable to solve the problem of a large urban black underclass, whose conditions,of crime and drugs and teenage pregnancies, are steadily deteriorating 3.

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African Americans have met this desperate situation in part in a positive way,by the so-called «politics of difference-, through new identifications based ,ontheir status as outsiders, essentially by turning back to their roots - ?y weanngAfrican dress, by taking African names and religions, by promoting high schoolsreserved for black males, and by Afrocentric curricula. A similar phenomenonhas emerged, in varying degrees, among Hispanic, South East Aslan, and o~hercommunities of recent immigrants. In varying degrees, mainstream Amenca.nsociety has been receptive to these developments. Although sprung froJ? econ~rmcand political tragedy and the racial divisions and moral failures ofAmencan soclety,multiculturalism should be defended and ~ommonly(although by no mea~s

universally) is defended, as a positive force, in schools and universities and ~society generally. Although not free ofthe potential for adverse social co~equences ,multiculturalism enriches and broadens America's cultural perspectives. In theglobal village it promotes international understanding and communication withother cultures 5.

By contrast, within the Afrocentric movement the roots of Afro-Hellenismare grounded in the traditional respect that Western society accords to the Gre~ksand to Greek culture of the period 700-300 B.C.E. At its basis, Afro-Hellemsmclaims that many of the greatest «achievements- ofGreek culture during this ~riodwere in fact derived from black Africa. Afro-Hellenism has also had a difflCultbirth, in large part because its advocates have not been trained Classicis~ ~r a~­

chaeologists. As a result, some exponents of this orientation have made ~ludl­cious statements about the connections between Africa and Greece, and thlS hasgiven the opponents of Afrocentrism sticks to beat them with. Th.us for example,in a recent article in the New Republic Professor Mary Lefkowltz of WellesleyCollege writes of an unhappy and even hostile student in her class oD: Plato a~dSocrates who later explained that Lefkowitz had been guilty of a senous orms­.sion. An~ther instructor had told her that Socrates (as suggested by his flat nose)was black. This other instructor also noted that Classicists always refuse to men­tion the African origins of Socrates and Greek culture generally, in o.rder to con­ceal that -the legacy of ancient Greece· was stolen from Egypt 6: In C~cago wh~reI teach three times this fall my lecture-survey of early EgyptIan hlStOry was m­terrupt~d by a student who claimed that I was -totally d~storting. Egypti~n his­tory by not mentioning that the Egyptians wer: black. (This s~dentstated ill classthat archaeologists had burned black mumrrues to conceal t~lS fact.) The 350 S?­called Afrocentric schools in the U.S., as well as the publtc school systems mDetrOit, Washington, and other predominantly black cities, ~re heavily influ~ncedby a set of documents, called the -African-~erican~~selilleEssays., which at­tribute to black Africans much of Greek SClence, reltglon, and phllosophy, andwhich also defend the scientific validity ofparapsychology, astrology, and religion.That the Egyptians were black is a cardinal tenet of Afro-~ellenism.Black alsowere Cleopatra, Hannibal, Euclid, Eratosthenes (as a natIve of Cyrene), J~sus,even Pushkin and Beethoven (one of his ancestors was apparently Moonsh).Irnhotep who invented the pyramids was black; the Pythagorean theorem, theconcept ofpi, geometric formulas, the concept ofth~ screw ~nd th~ lev~r all camefrom Africa. The claim has been advanced that dunng the flrst rmllemum B.C.E.

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tl1e Egyptians invented the glider (based on the painting of a falcon which a pass­ing English businessman mistook for a model airplane). It has even been saidthat Napoleon personally shot offthe nose of the Sphinx so it would not be recog­nized as African 7.

These exaggerations have done the cause ofAfrocentrism no benefit. In 1987,however, Rutgers University Press published the first volume of a more seriousdefense ofAfro-Hellenism, in what will be a four-part series entitled BlackAtbena:The Afroasiatic Roots ofClassical Civilization, by Martin Bernal 8. The argumentsin these books now constitute much of the contemporary intellectual underpin­nings of Afro-Hellenism. Bernal, a British emigre to the U.S., teaches East Asiangovernments at Cornell. He states that in 1975, as a consequence of a mid-lifecrisis, he began to seek out his own ethnic heritage, which was partlyJewish 0,xii-xiii); in addition, his grandfather Sir Alan Gardiner wrote what remains thestandard dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language. Proclaiming hin1self0, 3)an amateur in the tradition ofChampollion (who deciphered the Egyptian RosettaStone) and Michael Ventris (who deciphered the Cretan-Mycenean syllabary LinearB), Bernal made (as he thought) two fundamental discoveries. The first was amarked and deliberate racism and anti-Semitism among generations ofscholarsof Greco-Roman antiquity. In his saddening chronicle of this Bernal is devastat­ing. His discussion is a notable contribution to Western intellectual history. Toquote just two statements cited by Bernal that from this perspective may exemplifythe whole, J. A. de Gobineau, the author ofEssai sur l'inegalite des races bumaines0853-55), wrote that -the black variety [of persons]. is the lowest and lies at thebottom of the ladder. The animal character lent to its basic form imposes its des­tiny from the moment of conception. It never leaves the most restricted intellec­tual zones· (1,241). Ernest Renan, also a 19th-century French scholar and direc­tor of the College de France, st<1ted, -the Semitic race is to be recognized almostentirely by negative characteristics. It has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science,nor philosophy. (I, 346). Examples of racism and anti-Semitism in Classical scholar­ship can be multiplied ad nauseam. I myselfwas taught in school that the Romanswere blond-haired. Indeed, until recen~y it was not uncommon for anthropologiststo deny the African origins of humanity. Bernal attributes the success of BlackAtbena to racism, since he is white, middle-class and mainstream. The earlierbooks of the Senegalese natural scientist Cheikh Anta Diop were largely ignored9.

In contrast to Diop and others, however, Bernal knows the rules of the academicgame, and uses the format of traditional scholarship, with evidence, argument,and bibliography. He hin1self has also said that his work has been accepted overhis predecessors because it is -coherent. 10.

Bemal's second discovery was ofa different order: that racist and anti-Semiticscholarship concealed and continues to conceal the historical fact that from theBronze Age onwards, Greek culture was essentially the product of two invasionsby Egyptians and Levantines. According to Bernal, the Egyptians first irtvadedand conquered both Boeotia (a region in Greece to me north of Athens) andthe Mediterranean island of Crete late in the third millenium. To document theinvasion of Boeotia, Bernal adduces three main data 0, 18): the name Thebes,in both Boeotia and Egypt associated with a sphinx; the sophisticated drainage

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system used in Boeotia's Lake Copais; and finally a flat-topped tumulus in Boeo~ian

Thebes which one of its excavators thought was similar to the stepped pyranuds.To defend his idea of an Egyptian invasion of Crete at this same time (that is,that •a succession ofUpper Egyptian black pharoahs sharing the name Menthot~­[I, 18] colonized Crete and established the Minoan culture), Bernal adduces mparticular the Cretan development of palatial architecture around 2000 B.C.E.,and similarities between the Cretan bull cult and the Egyptian bull cult of Mont.The Cretan king Minos he identifies with the first Egyptian pharoah, Menes er,63-64).

According to Bemal, a second invasion of Greeceoccurred early in the se~o~dmillenium, by Phoenicians (that is to say, Levantine Semitic-speakers: this 1S ~n­

dicated by the traditions about the Phoenician Kadmos), and by the Hyksos, m­habitants of lower Egypt, originally from Syria and now expelled from Egypt. Theseinvaders brought with them many things, such as the horse-and-chariot, and alsothe alphabet (.the latest the alphabet could have reached the Aegean is the mid­dle of the second millenium- n, 16]). They made major contributions to the Greekvocabulary that help to establish their presence in Greece. Mycenean and l~ter

Greek culture, Bernal says, is essentially the culture of Levantine and EgypuanHyksos invaders, as the Greeks themselves knew. It was ·the conventional v.iewamong Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. that •Greek culture had ansenas the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians whohad civilized the native inhabitants" er, 1).

The evaluation of these arguments is complicated first because our politi­cal sympathies against the terrible wrong of racism may in some cases clash -withthe reasonable and legitimate standards of scholarly argumentation, and secondbecause important contacts certainly did exist between Greece, Egypt and theLevant, as for many years a number of distinguished Classical scholars havedemonstrated 11. Determining the extent and the significance of these contacts,and of Egyptian and Near Eastern influences on the Greeks, is a question neces­sarily requiring great learning in a number of different fields, and a fine senseof historical distinctions. Not trained in any of these areas, however, Bernal hasproduced an ideological program rather than a careful scholarly analysis. Thisis doubly unfortunate, first because a legitimate argument can be made for at leastpart of the general hypothesis which he has developed, and second because hiswork can only add to the confusion surrounding this topic (which it may evenserve to discredit). Here I can present only the briefest outline of the difficultiesBernal's hypotheses involve.

The main problem is that of the ancient evidence. Concerning Bernal's mainarguments for an Egyptian invasion of Boeotia during the late third rnillenium,it must be pointed out that sophisticated irrigation systems were known in manyplaces besides Egypt, and in any case their presence need not showrnilitary con­quest 12. The argument from names (Thebes) could equally show that the Greekscolonized the city of Athens in the American state of Georgia. If historical, anEgyptian conquest ofBoeotia in the third millenium should have left somematerialsign, in the form of Egyptian objects, in tombs or elsewhere. But there are none.Bernal is prepared for this objection, asserting (what is not entirely true) that the

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area is largely unexcavated er, 9). The response to this can only be that beforeclaiming an Egyptian invasion, he should wait for adequate evidence.

Concerning the Egyptian and Levantine conquest ofGreece in the secondmillenium, Bernal adduces three categories of evidence: archaeology, myth,and linguistic borrowings. The archaeological evidence he provides is bothlimited and of uncertain significance. The argument based on the derivationof Cretan palace-construction from Egypt ignores the possibility of indepen­dent development. Furthermore, all such parallels might be the result of tradeor other forms of contact, not conquest. Bernal invariably selects high datesfor materials from Egypt and the Near East, to show that influence went fromEgypt to Crete. Lower dates would mean that cultural influence went in the otherdirection. Although Greece is supposed to have had the alphabet by 1500, noexamples of it occur until the eighth century, although many texts in Linear Aand Linear B are preserved. Bernal defends his belief that the Mycenean shaftgraves contain the bodies of Hyksos invaders by the claim that the moustachesand· strong" beards on faces represented on Mycenean masks and two Cretanseals are similar to that on a painted rhyton found at Jericho. But the Jerichorepresentation has no moustache and the beards are in fact dissimilar 13. Onlyone Egyptian object, a scarab, has been found in a shaft grave, a late one atMycenae.

Bernal's case also rests heavily on myth and legend. Thus the Greeks toldthat King Danaos moved from Egypt to Argos and became King of the Danaans;Herodotos says that the Spartan kings traced their ancestors back to Egypt, andthat the Phoenicians inhabited Boeotia and taught the locals many things includ­ing writing. Bernal interprets these stories as memories of an Egyptian andPheonician invasion 1000 years earlier. But of what historical value are mythsand legends? The Thebans believed they were sprung from dragon's teeth; theAthenians that they were autochthonous; nineteenth-century Germans that theRomans had blond hair. Simply to claim the historical veracity of one's favoritemyth is obviously a doubtful methodology. .

On the issue of language, Bernal claims that up to 25% of Greek is ofSemiticorigin, and another 20-25% is of Egyptian origin er, xiv). However, his demonstra­tions of this, his suggested etymologies, are based only on superficial wordresemblances rather than principles of linguistic adaptation. Many specific deriva­tions seem inherently implausible 14. Thus psyche, the Greek word for soul, isderived from Egyptian sw, a «parasol- or «shelter-; the winged horse Pegasos isderived from pgw, ·a jug for washing-; «Lacedaimon. (= Sparta) is etymologizedas «The Howling/Gnawing Spirit., that is, Anubis er, 53; IT ch. 6); the name Athens,Athenai, he derives not from some indigenous pre-Greek form but from theEgyptian goddess Nt or Neit, in the form Ht Nt, the «Temple of Neit· - and hence•Black Athena-er, 51-52, II ch. 5). These are clearly just amateurish guesses, noneprovable. Even if some Greek words were derived from Egypt, this could haveoccurred by borrowing, not conquest.

The essential problem posed by Black Athena lies in Bernal's unwillingnesscritically to evaluate the data. Though he purports to be playing by the rules ofscholarship, in fact his methodology is not guided by a complete or objective

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evaluation of complex or conflicting evidence. Rather, anything, ancient ormodem, that supports his general position is accepted without critical examina­tion, while conflicting materials are ignored or summarily denied. A central ex­ample of this concerns the racial status of the ancient Egyptians. Bernal's singleancient text stating that Egyptians were black is a passage in Herodotos (2.104),where Herodotos guesses that the people of Colchis were of Egyptian originsbecause they were black-skinned (melagcbroes) and had wooly hair (oulotricbes).T? accept this testimony, obviously we must answer three questions. First, whatdid Herodotos mean by black and wooly-haired? Second, is his testimony sup­ported or corroborated by external data? And third, how reliable was Herodotosas a source? On the ftrst point, on the meaning of melagcbroes and oulotricbes,the most distinguished African American Classicist, Professor Frank Snowden ofHoward University, has argued that references to •black» Egyptians in Herodotos,Aeschylus and Aristotle were only to swarthy complexions, to people darker thanthe Greeks themselves: Greeks called true blacks .Ethiopians» 15. Herodotosdescribes Ethiopians as having hair woolier than that ofany other people on earth(7.70), and several times he distinguishes Ethiopians from Egyptians (2.30,2.42,cf. 3.19). The Greek's different sense of colorfromours is well known: thus theycalled the sea ,purple., faces ·green·, and both wine and the earth .black· 16.

As for Herodotos's oulotricbes, .wooly hair., the Greeks did not limit this to ne­groids. Twice in the Odys:stry, for example, Odysseus is said to have had oulas komas(6 ..231, 23.158). On the issue of whether Herodotos is corroborated by othereVId~~ce,fuller and more detailed descriptions of the Egyptians are supplied byManilms.(4-?72-30): Strabo 05.1.13) and other ancient authors. Manilius says,•The EthiopIans stam the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness'less sun-burnt are the natives of India; the land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile:darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its ftelds: it is a countrynearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone» (trans. G. Gould).Stra.bo notes that southern Indians resemble Ethiopians in color, and northernIn~Ians the EID'?tian~. None of these passages is mentioned by Bernal. Finally,third, Herodotos s test:unony is not automatically reliable. In Book 2 ofhis Historieson Egypt, he writes offlying snakes (2.75), hippopotamoses with horses' mane~(2.71), and vast unsupported stone ceilings in a labyrinth of 3000 rooms whichHerodotos swears he has personally inspected (2.148). For these and otherreasons, DetlefFeWing and Kimball Arrnayor have argued that Herodotos neveraetu~ytra~e~edt? Egypt or elsewhere 17. Since in their iconography the EgyptiansroutInely dIStInguIshed themselves from black Africans - evidence also nowherementi~:>ned.or discussed by Bernal- Herodotos's statement about black EgyptianColchians IS a very thin reed on which to build a contrary argument.

. On the racial status of the Egyptians, central to Afro-Hellenism, Bernal infact c0nt:uses the issue. Although he admits that Nefertiti is represented asCaucasoId and that Cleopatra was probably Greek, his several injudiciousstatements - beginning with the title Black-Atbena - about. black pharoahs» 0241) and Her~dotos'sc?nception of the Egyptians as black 0,52-53), imply ~black Egypt. Listen to hIS summation 0, 241-242}

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To what. race·, then, did the Ancient Egyptians belong? I am very dubious of the utilityof the concept· race- in general... I am even more skeptical about the possibility of fmd­ing an answer in this particular case. Research on the question usually reveals far moreabout the predisposition of the researcher than about the question itself. Nevertheless...I believe that Egyptian civilization was fundamentally African... Furthermore, I am con­vinced that many of the most powerful Egyptian dynasties... were made up of pharoahswhom one can usefully call black.

Jasper Griffin has rightly called attention to the obscurities of this passage 18.

The concept of race, Bernal begins, is •not useful., but Egyptian civilization was•fundamentally African» (what does that mean?), and to call many pharoahs blackis .useful». Does .useful- mean it is true? Bernal admits that after proposing thename -Black Athena. for his volume, he came to prefer .African Athena•. Hispublisher, however, insisted on .Black Athena. because the combination ofblacksand women would sell 19. This is a poor excuse for misleading his readers.

Five criticisms of Black Atbena may be raised on a more general level. Firstand above all, Bemal's approach is fundamentally Eurocentric. He does not at­tempt to show that the accomplishments or cultures of African or Levantinesocieties were different from those of Greece, but only that they were earlier.Greece remains the model, the cultural icon.

Second, although Bernal brilliantly surveys the appalling literary record ofracism and anti-Semitism in Classical scholarship after 1785, he does not discussor evaluate the scholarly llterature from this period, which presented new evidenceor new arguments about early history and civilization. However, these materialswere fundamental to the development ofthe modem conceptions of those topics 20.

Third, Bemal's approach is substantially diffusionist and anti-evolutionary:Greek culture was largely the sum of the Greek's Afroasiatic heritage, whichremained little changed for over 1000 years. In Bernal the Greeks seem merelydisplaced Phoenicians and Egyptians 21. But the cultural uniqueness of the Greeksor of any people is not just a proposition of racist archaeology. Opinions mayvary on the merits of Greek society: violent and militaristic, based on slavery,oppressive to women, even phallocentric 22. Yet whatever one thinks of them,the Greeks and Greek civilization after 750 B.C.E. were unique, constantly learn­ing from others, but making what they learned their own. Egyptian culture wasfundamentally distinct. Nothing in Egyptian writings parallels the growth of criti­cal thought, the divergence of philosophy into many conflicting schools, or thespeculative and inquiring humanism characteristic of the sophistic movement.The model for Bernal's hypothesis is in fact Western cultural imperialism, inverted.In his view, the Egyptians imposed their culture on an indigenous populationby the force of conquest.

Finally, his approach is itself an example of inverse racism. To claim, toutcourt, that Greek culture derives from black Egypt is as distorted and potential­ly as dangerous as the claim that it derived from blond-haired Aryans. Bernalhimself has countenanced this claim: •I hate racism of any kind, but I think whiteracism is much more frightening» than black racism 23.

Much of the explanation for the appeal of Black Atbena derives from thewider cultural phenomenon ofAfrocentrism which it is helping to fuel. The goal

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of increasing Western comprehension of non-Western cultures is entirely laudable.But Bernal's irresponsible scholarship in the service of Afro-Hellenism has de­creased that comprehension. It also contributes to racial tensions and to social,cultural, and educational fragmentation, as the legitimate objections to his theoriesof those actually competent in ancient history and archaeology merely seem fur­ther examples of racism. Frantz Fanon has rightly observed, «the historical neces­sity in which men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims andto speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead themup a blind alley» 24.

Ifthese issues were not so important, Bemal might be remembered as anotheramateur eccentric in the tradition ofVelikowsky (cf. I, 6), writing enormous bookson personal and idiosyncratic theories. However, Bernal is a sophisticated in­tellectual who has read the criticisms against him and yet persists, despite thecritical rejection of his reconstructions by virtually everyone who is trained tojudge them. What is his motivation? When he remarks that it is «useful. to con­sider Egyptians black, this suggests a political agenda, and Bernal has been notuncandid about this. His political purpose, he says, is to -lessen European cul­tural arrogance» (I, 73). -Blacks have been told they never had a great civiliza­tion, and therefore never will. 25. Consciously, he may think that if he can drivethe dialogue out to an extreme, the center itself will shift. But his interior motiva­tions must in fact be confused. Since Bernal himself has framed his quest inpsychoanalytic and mythological terms, as that of an outsider, undergoing apsychological crisis, searching out his roots and arriving to destroy a tradition,it may therefore be legitimate (despite the obvious dangers of speculativepsychohistory) to ponder the relevance of certain elmentary myth910gical­psychological models, ofOedipus aginst Laios, Jesus against Herod, Moses againstthe pharoah. That is, a son, of uncertain parentage, comes from outside to over­throw the king who was his father, but who earlier had not acknowledged himand who had tried to kill him.

Sister Souljah remarked with some justice: -two wrongs may not make a right,but they sure make it even·. Yet conscious error for political purposes will sure­ly not help the cause of -emerging. peoples, or the communities in which theylive. Any student who is taught that Socrates was black, or that the Egyptians in­vented airplanes, will ultimately be embarassed, as Professor Lefkowitz's studentwas. Lefkowitz concludes: «to the extent that Bernal has helped to provide anapparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be heldculpable, even ifhis intentions are honorable and his motives sincere .. (n. 6 above,p. 35). The discussion provoked by Black Athena has had the great merit of in­ducing many intellectuals to broaden their perspectives, to incorporate the civiliza­tions of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and elsewhere in courses entitled «The AncientWorld .. ,These are fundamental goals. The tragedy of Black Athena is that it bothobscures and politicizes centrally important subjects: the interconnections of thegreat civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Minoan Crete, Palestine and Greece;the absence of racial prejudice or racial consciousness in ancient societies 26; thecontributions of blacks in the great and multiracial Egyptian civilization; and, notleast, the accomplishments of the Greeks. Racially oriented (rather than multi-

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culturalist) scholarship must surely be abandoned, as divisive and intelle~al­ly senseless. Most Egyptians were light brown Afri~ans. ~ost Gr~ekswere hghtbrown Europeans, who merely left sub-Saharan Afnca a httle earher. In our c?m­mon African origin, we are all Afrocentrists. A balanced and accurate examma­tion of the issues raised by Bernal, of the debt which Greece owed to the non­Greek world, would be a major contribution to scholarship, and a service tohumanity. But that job remains to be done.

Robert W. Wal1acea sraduate ofOxford and Harvard, is Associate Profe~sorOf Classics and Ancient History at Northwestern, and tsthe author ofHarmonia Mundi: Music and Philosophyin the Ancient World

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