The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
only contributed to an avalanche of radical propaganda without basis in fact’ (1996, 174). In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, Keith Windschuttle lays a heavy burden at Bernal’s door: ‘Although he now wants to distance himself from those Afrocentrists who claim that black Africans invented quantum physics, practised aeronautics, ruled Egypt and discovered America, Bernal was the main academic figure who created the intellectual environment in which such beliefs could flourish’ (2001). An outspoken proponent of the African-American cause, V.Y. Mudimbe has reflected that ‘the respectability of an African history reconquered by Africanism from the margins of primitiveness into which colonial science had inscribed it, today authorizes shaky accounts of the pharaohs’ (1994, 43). Bernal has himself conceded the point, citing Tony Martin: ‘If any of Bernal’s Afrocentric followers had slowed down in their speed reading of Black Athena, they would have noticed that he was as much or more concerned with a “Semitic” origin for Greek civilization as for African influence over Greece’ (Bernal, 2001, 16). Furthermore, Bernal protests, ‘I have never suggested that the Ancient Egyptian population as a whole looked like stereotypical West Africans’ (23). We shall return to this point.
There is thus very little that Bernal’s work can contribute to our understanding of either the African sources and composition of the ancient Egyptian world, or, more pertinently for my purposes, the shifting perceptions that Egyptians may have had of themselves as ‘African’, of their African neighbours, or of their own situatedness in the continent that they themselves did not yet know as an ‘African’ whole. As Guy MacLean Rogers has put it: ‘In tracing the allegedly Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization, Bernal has almost nothing to say about the entire continent of Africa and its many diverse ancient civilizations. In short, Black Athena is not about ancient Africa at all’ (1996b, 449).
It would not be flippant to add that Afrocentrism itself is not about Africa either. American Afrocentrists have created a mythic Africa, ‘The Africa That Never Was’, to satisfy the recuperative dynamics of North American theorists of race. Furthermore, if it is indeed as Shavit avers – that the ‘concept of race and of a homogeneous [i.e., genetically separate] black race is the cornerstone of the radical Afrocentric world view’ (24) – then any South African who has lived through the nightmare of apartheid must find this American Afrocentric aberration not only tragically ironic, but also wholly abhorrent. In the words of Peter Mitchell, ‘such arguments merely buy into Africa’s historical definition by Europeans as a single landmass equated with an arbitrarily colour-defined racial group and understood through overly simplistic correlations of “race” and “culture”’ (2005, 5). True Africanists, among whom I should wish to count myself, want to explore the more exciting and truly surprising dynamics of their continent’s actual history. For perhaps the greatest irony suffusing Bernal’s enterprise and the polemics surrounding it is that if one knows where to look, ancient African elements do indeed run like a watermark through the fabric of much of ancient Egypt’s symbolic and representational art and cultural praxis, as I hope to show.
The charge that Bernal’s thesis ‘is not about Africa at all’ may be pressed further, as we attend to other elements of Bernal’s ‘underpinning’ of Afrocentrist arguments that persistently misrepresent African realities. Although, as we have seen, Bernal does allow for the demographic heterogeneity of Egypt ‘at least for the last 7 000 years’ (242), his generally loose description of ancient Egyptians as ‘black’ and ‘Nubian’ legitimates reductivist Afrocentrist conceptions of both Egyptian and Nubian populations as simply ‘Negroid’. Such conceptions, seemingly authorised by Bernal’s scholarship, have served to marginalise other African peoples whose own cultural achievements and possible contributions to the making of ancient Egyptian culture need much fuller exploration and acknowledgment. In particular, two other major phyla of African peoples – those that constitute what Stephen Oppenheimer calls the ‘Berber motif’ of North Africa (whom the Greeks and Romans called ‘Libyans’ and who were not ‘Negroid’ but Afro-Asiatic), and, secondly, the huge assembly of African peoples who in the early Holocene Era (about 10000 BP) populated Africa from the Red Sea coast to the Cape of Good Hope, and of whom the Khoisan of southern Africa are among the last survivors – are not only habitually overlooked by Africanist discourses inspired by Black Athena, but remain insufficiently considered in speculations on the making of ancient Egypt.
Kevin C. MacDonald, challenging Diop’s surmise that Egypt at the end of the Pleistocene Era (ca 12000 BP) was inhabited by ‘tall Black Africans’, suggests that instead we should turn our attention to the ‘little peoples’ of the ‘distinctive early Holocene sub-Saharan hunter-gatherer complexes … attested archaeologically’ throughout the eastern half of the continent, and who were not Negroid, but who emerge persistently in the continent’s folklore, including ‘West African oral traditions [that] still do speak of autochthonous “little peoples” who were displaced or replaced’ (2003, 97). These ‘little peoples’, of whom the Central African pygmies and the southern African Khoisan are surviving instances, occupied vast swathes of the southern, central and eastern parts of the continent before the great Bantu pan-African migrations of the last two millennia. Over the last few decades, explorations of the human genome and the distribution of human genetic families have revealed these ‘little peoples’ to harbour the oldest phyla of human genetic lineages in the world (Soodyall, 2006; Wells, 2006). According to Spencer Wells, ‘fossil evidence suggests that 10 000 years ago people similar in appearance to the modern San Bushmen were found as far north as Ethiopia, indicating that their present distribution is the remnant of a once widespread people’ (2006, 145).
We need, in other words, to reconsider the evidence we have as to who the earliest Egyptians might have been, and where their culture might have come from. The ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ is now dead and buried; Diop’s ‘Negroid hypothesis’ can be shown to be no less racist, naïve and exclusivist, while various other versions of an ‘Afrocentrist hypothesis’ fare no better. But what about the possibility that Holocene, pre-Dynastic north-east African culture may owe at least some of its defining features to the ‘little people’ who so often crop up in descriptions of ancient Africa (even in Diop’s), who once inhabited eastern Africa from north to south, who were responsible for virtually all of Africa’s rock art, and whose symbolic world prefigures or resonates with that of the Egyptians in intriguing ways? What about a ‘Khoisanoid hypothesis’?
2
WHO WERE THE EGYPTIANS?
Many Egyptologists regard a discussion of the skin colour of Ancient Egyptians as at best irrelevant and at worst racist … and most museums would balk at discussing the question in displays.
—MacDonald and Rice, Consuming Ancient Egypt, 2003, 99
Of course, ancient Egyptians were not San Bushmen, whose genetic markers peter out north of Zimbabwe (Soodyall and Jenkins, 2006; Wells, 2006). Nevertheless, the Neolithic inhabitants of the Nile Valley some 10 000 years ago, from whom pre-Dynastic Egyptians evolved over the next 5 000 years, must have been, like pygmy and proto-Khoisanoid hunter-gatherers from further south, instances of the diverse Stone Age human groups who were spread throughout eastern, central and southern Africa before the beginning of the Bantu-speaker migrations that would in due course supplant hunter-gatherers from large parts of the continent. We have already encountered Spencer Wells’s suggestion, based on the early findings of National Geographic’s Genographic Project, that ‘people similar in appearance to the modern San Bushmen’ lived as far north as Ethiopia in the Holocene era. Further north, we know of the even earlier Sangoan peoples of the Khartoum Mesolithic, whose culture, it has been suggested, may have been the ultimate source of north-east African civilisation (Welsby and Anderson, 2004). Where might the earliest ‘Egyptians’ have fitted into these configurations?
Assessing the ethnic composition of ancient Egypt’s population is a notoriously Procrustean exercise, and, as my epigraph suggests, many Egyptologists would regard it as best left alone. Standard textbooks such as Douglas J. Brewer and Emily Teeter’s Egypt and the Egyptians (1999) make no reference to Egypt’s ethnic composition. Béatrix Midant-Reynes confesses towards the end of her otherwise comprehensive Prehistory of Egypt