The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
Europe. Katherine George, in a brilliant ten-page paper published in Isis, identified the consistent tendency in European literature from Herodotus to Haggard ‘to emphasize the strange, the shocking, and the degrading qualities of the peoples and cultures they deal with, and thus to emphasize the gulf between the civilized and the primitive worlds’ (1958, 63).
Complementary insights emerged from Wylie Sypher’s examination of British anti-slavery literature of the eighteenth century, which summed up its findings as follows: ‘The African appears … as a thoroughly noble figure, idealized out of all semblance to reality, and living in a pastoral Africa – a pseudo-African in a pseudo-Africa’ (1942, 9). These remained the signatory themes of the discourse, and were most comprehensively canvassed in two theses submitted by Hammond and Jablow, also at Columbia, in the early 1960s and subsequently developed into their book, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (1970), republished in 1977 as The Myth of Africa.
The popularity of the Hammond and Jablow volume confirmed that there was little left to add to a minatory, binarist discourse of dismantlement that condemned all British – and by extension all Western – writing about Africa from at least the Renaissance to the nineteenth century as bigoted, insulting, ignorant and racist, and as exposing European prejudice while saying nothing worthwhile about Africa. The gist of such discourse was captured many years later by Alberto Manguel: ‘The West recognizes the Other only to better despise it, and is then astonished at the answer reflected back’ (2006, 70). Jablow’s verdict summed up and anticipated those of a generation of like-minded commentators:
The ‘beastly savage’ and the ‘noble savage’ are conventions equally lacking in realism. Both represent opposite poles on the single scale of English values…. All the virtues of character esteemed by the British – courage, a sense of honour, truthfulness, refinement, intelligence – are embodied in the one; the other epitomizes the non-valued opposites – cravenness, dishonesty, gluttony, and stupidity (1963, 44).
As the present study will show, Jablow’s invocation of the eighteenth-century trope of ‘beastly’ and ‘noble savage’ pointed in the right direction, but failed to discern the true sources and implications of a conceit of ‘two Ethiopias’ as old as Homer. But the stark and punitive alterity, a manichaean binarism, deployed in almost all of the works identified above, inevitably led to a dead end. In 1978, G.D. Killam, who had himself produced such a work of thematic content analysis and categorisation, Africa in English Fiction 1874–1939 (1968), and who could thus recognise the looming impasse, summed up common misgivings in a review of Brian Street’s The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive Society’ in English Fiction 1858–1920 (1975):
There is a pattern in such books as Street’s that is dictated by the body of literature they set out to scrutinize. And the pattern in the literature is dictated by a typicality in the assumptions made by the authors who write the books (1978, 483).
And, one had to add, in the assumptions of scholars who continued to produce critiques such as Street’s.
The tendency towards an accusatory and manichaean reading of the Eurocolonial record of African encounter was encouraged by an increasing number of black African writers entering the discourse (Dike, 1956; Mphahlele, 1962/1974; Akinjogbin, 1967; Dathorne, 1974; Echeruo, 1978). They would lay the foundations of a substantial black revisionary enterprise, even as they often still failed to move beyond the binarist confines of prevailing models and the demands of an adversarial agenda. In these years Chinua Achebe notoriously called the Conrad of Heart of Darkness a ‘bloody racist’ (1978, 9), and Ezekiel (Es’kia) Mphahlele, embittered by exile from South Africa, expressed the rage subsumed in such scholarship, and which had also sharpened my own quest for the sources of white racism: ‘Whites have launched a barbarous onslaught on the blacks and after long long [sic] centuries of hurt, pillage and plunder by whites, the blacks are faced with unequivocal fascism’ (1974, 56). Behind such indictments one could detect the cadences and anger of Frantz Fanon, and he would increasingly come to occupy my field of vision.
By the mid-1970s, the stark binarisms of an emerging Africanist and revisionist historiography had become a major characteristic of and inspiration for African-American scholarship; an enterprise also set on drawing an empowering legitimacy from the uncompromising discourse of alterity just reviewed, and perpetuating its more aggressive claims. From such beginnings emerged the militant aims and tenets of academic Afrocentrism.
In Chapter 1, I deal more specifically with Afrocentrist speculations about ancient Egypt’s relations with Africa and the entanglement of these ideas with those of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), but some observations are pertinent here. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki once invoked as a scholarly commonplace ‘the irrefutable fact that the Egyptians who built that great civilization were “black with kinky hair” as the great Greek historian, Herodotus, said’ (2006, 26). The reference is to the Histories (2, 104), where it is not the Egyptians but the Colchians of the Black Sea, perhaps settler 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