The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
170).
The verdict on the extent to which users of a particular language are trapped by its terms to the exclusion of other cognitive systems must remain open. In the meantime, practitioners of cross-cultural studies must continue to explore the nature and possibilities of the zones of interaction available to them and suggested by the texts themselves. Some will continue to court logically untenable but politically seductive panaceas, as Dana D. Nelson (1992) does in assuring us that race is ‘a socially constructed idea, a fiction maintained through language, imagery and imagination’, while she nevertheless upholds a cognitive paradigm that discounts the power of the imagination and human discretion, and keeps us trapped in hard-wired racial alterities (cited by Elliot, 1994, 463). Similarly, Gustav Jahoda admits that ‘scant attention is given to minorities who held relatively more positive images of savages, or at least repudiated the extreme negative ones’ (1999, xvi), but then adopts an Occam’s Razor approach in which all cross-cultural records are reduced to starkly binarist chronicles of the absolute Other. Critics now hasten to join in the universal rejection of ‘race’ as an archetypal or essential entity – ‘the concept of race is socially created and thus historically variable’ (West, 1996, 3; see also Gates, 1985 and Sollors, 1989) – but continue to write as if this must not then mean that, over the ages, numerous commentators have been able to elude or oppose the ready simplicities of racism, and that many surprising, ironic and counter-hegemonic instances of cultural encounter will have occurred.
To complicate matters further, the comforting belief that race is merely a social construct is facing uncomfortable new challenges. The startling genetic discoveries that have been made in the last few years regarding the human genome and the distribution of genetically defined ‘families’ around the globe may well have to lead to further revisions of our concepts of ‘race’ and genetic socio-biology. Tom Wolfe has suggested that ‘an uncompromising determinism’, of which our ‘racial’ demographics may be an expression, may well be more firmly ‘genetically hard-wired’ in our ancestry than our political sensitivities are now willing to accept (1997, 6–10).
Precisely such ‘genetic hard-wiring’ is being traced by several major research projects currently in progress, notably the National Geographic’s Genographic Project (Wells, 2006). The objective of this and similar investigations (see Sykes, 2001) is to plot such connections among human groups (some formerly defined as ‘races’) as are indicated by genetic mutations in our mitochondrial and chromosomal profiles ‘that occur in a random manner [but] accumulate in a stepwise fashion over time’ (Barkhan and Soodyall, 2006, 139) so as to lay down a retraceable record of our ancestry. These genetic lineages confirm that all living human beings indeed descend from ‘a common female and male ancestor’ (op. cit.) – a genetic Eve and Adam – but have raised other alarms.
Marek Kohn, author of The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (1996), has warned that ‘we are ill-prepared to respond to the complex challenges posed by the racial arguments bobbing up in the unstoppable tide of genetic research’ (2006, 9), while Henry Gee is concerned that the fear of confronting the demographic implications of genetic research ‘has emasculated anthropology’ and ‘has denied physical anthropologists access to human variation’ (1994, 19). Kohn concludes The Race Gallery with a thought provocatively out of tune with contemporary non-racial ecumenicalism: ‘It is true that the only certain race is the human race. Perhaps, however, the time has come to explore how biological variation and social constructions are related…. Denial no longer appears to be an option’ (1996, 285).
Included in the undeniable genetic verities that are now emerging is the evidence that while all extant human beings may indeed descend from a single ‘mitochondrial Eve’ who lived about 200 000 years ago, the major migration out of Africa that peopled the rest of the world took place only 60 000 to 80 000 years ago. Before and since that emigration, which stemmed from a fairly confined African source, many other African human groups must have continued to evolve independently, some (such as the Khoisanoid peoples of southern Africa) in deep isolation from the rest of the continent’s peoples (not to mention the world’s), as the ‘text’ contained in human mitochondrial-DNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups is making increasingly clear (Stringer, 2006; Soodyall, 2006; Wells, 2006).
Simply put, the majority of Africans cannot have descended from migrations that left Africa between 80 000 and 60 000 years ago, but have to be the progeny of various (and very varied) human groups that remained in the continent. Chris Stringer speaks of ‘evidence from genetic data of the maintenance of deep and separate lineages during African human evolution’ (2006, 19). If the confident but unexamined mantra of a liberal academy that ‘race is quite literally no more than skin deep’ (Kidd, 2006, 3) should – in the light of such findings – come under renewed scrutiny, we must expect that the popular mind will once again be confirmed in racial ideologies that seek to exaggerate difference. This is not a comforting prospect.
While I return to some of the implications of these revelations in Chapters 2 and 3, the present study cannot hope to resolve the dilemmas glimpsed above. Yet the likelihood of their growing urgency may make my attempt to unpick the beginnings and course of a two-millennia-old discourse of race ever more pertinent. For mine is really a cultural genome project: the tracking of the memetic genealogy of the Western world’s earliest images of Africa and Africans, and of both the tenacity, yet also the great variability, of the resultant icons of race and culture.
When I started this project some thirty years ago, postcolonial Africa was celebrating its achievement of independence from Europe; three decades later, Africa still has to free itself from the bonds of Western corporate and global imperialism, as well as the depredations of venal and dictatorial rulers who simply appropriated the resources, mindsets and exploitative structures surrendered by departing colonialists. My study may help to explain why it is taking such a bitterly long time for Africa to recover from its Eurocolonial past.
The work now before the reader concentrates on the images of Africa and Africans that evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece, Rome and the wider Mediterranean world, and in the early Christian era. Large time scales are involved, and one must resist the temptation to see the human relationships, conflicts and demographic dispensations of north-east Africa in ancient times in terms of information and attitudes that have emerged since. In the words of Henry Ansgar Kelly: ‘The bane of all historical writing is the impulse to retro-fit past events with present-day theories – that is, to interpret past events in the light of later knowledge’ (2006, 2). I confess, however, that my ‘Ethiopia’ is very much an imagined world, despite also being a real (though peripatetic) place; it is a metaphor or iconic node for a range of perceptions about Africa that were held by different observers at different times over many centuries, but that also steadily confirmed views of Africa held by many current observers.
Not only must the earliest Mediterranean and proto-European conceptions of Africa have been mediated primarily through Egypt, but Dynastic Egypt must itself have had both ancient African roots and affinities, yet also evolving perceptions of that African hinterland as ‘different’. The African ancestry and identity of Egypt is nowadays a controversial subject, and in Chapter 1, I survey some of the parameters and implications of a revisionary discourse associated in some minds with Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), concluding that while the Nile Valley ancestors of Dynastic Egyptians were not ‘Negroid’ or ‘Broad African’, they were certainly African.
Chapters 2 and 3 attempt to provide more specific answers to the question ‘Who were the Egyptians?’ by surveying the history of Nile Valley occupation since Holocene times, the emergence of Africa’s four major language families, and the proposition that proto-Egyptians must have belonged to one of the great phyla of pre-Bantu-speaking peoples who once populated the eastern parts of Africa from the Red Sea hinterland to the Cape of Good Hope, and