Race in antiquity: Truly out of Africa

law, politics, and religion. Yet there has been a furious campaign to discredit African influence and to claim a miraculous birth for Western civilisation.
A number of books and articles by white and some black conservatives seek to disprove the Egyptian influence on Greece. One of the most recent works in this genre is a book by Wellesley Professor Mary Lefkowitz, “Not Out of Africa”.
It continues what Martin Bernal calls in “Black Athena” the Aryanist tradition of attacking African agency in regard to Greece by raising straw people arguments and then knocking them over. This is unfortunate but to be expected by an intellectual tradition that supports the dominant mythologies of race in the history of the West by diverting attention to marginal issues in the public domain.
Afrocentricity seeks to discover African agency in every situation. Who are we? What did we do? Where did we travel? What is our role in geometry? How do we as a people function in this or that contemporary situation?
the Afrocentrist does not advance African particularity as universal. This is its essential difference from Eurocentricity which is advanced in the United States and other places as if the particular experiences of Europeans (are) universal. This imposition is ethnocentric and often racist. Afrocentricity advances the view that it is possible for a pluralism of cultures to exist without hierarchy but this demands cultural equality and respect.
Mary Lefkowitz’ book has sought to re-assert the idea that Greece did not receive substantial contributions from Kemet, the original name of Egypt, which is the Greek name for the ancient land. Professor Lefkowitz has offered the public a pablum history which ignores or distorts the substantial evidence of African influence on Greece in the ancient writings of Aetius, Strabo, Plato, Homer, Herodotus, Diogenes, Plutarch, and Diodorus Siculus.
A reader of Lefkowitz’ book must decide if she or he is going to believe those who wrote during the period or someone who writes today. History teaches us that a person is more likely to distort an event the farther away from it she happens to be. If you have a choice, go with the people who saw the ancient Egyptians and wrote about what they saw. Conservative white columnists have felt a tremendous need to respond in the most vigorous fashion with their applause to shore up their racial mythologies. now George Will (Newsweek, February 12, 1996) and Roger Kimball (Wall Street Journal, February 14, 1996) have seen fit to bless
Prof Lefkowitz’ “Not Out of Africa” as a sort of definitive moment in intellectual history.
It is no such moment. It is a racial argument clearly fast back-stepping. As is too often the case these days, however, Lefkowitz received the go-ahead to attack Afrocentricity by writing this book of blacks such as Anthony Appiah and Henry Gates. They have, of course, had a real problem with the Afrocentric idea.
What this indicates is that we have gone full circle from the Hegelian “Let us forget Africa” to a late 20th century attack on African scholarship by declaring, in the face of the evidence, that major influences on Greece were not out of Africa. And as such it will simply confirm the inability of some scholars to get beyond the imposition of their particularism of Europe.
No one can remove the gifts of Europe nor should that ever be the aim of scholarship but Greece cannot impose itself as some universal culture that developed full-blown out of nothing, without the foundations it received from Africa. The aim of Prof Lefkowitz is to support the unsupportable idea of a miraculous Greece and thus to enhance a white supremacist myth of the ancient world. Perhaps George Will and Roger Kimball believe that that they have found a saviour of the pure white thesis. They are wrong. The thesis cannot be supported with facts although Prof Lefkowitz goes to great length to confuse the picture by concentrating on irrelevancies. Prof Lefkowitz’ work pales besides the research done by Cornell Professor Martin Bernal, “Black Athena,” the late Cheikh Anta
Diop, author of “Civilisation or Barbarism,” and Temple Professor Theophile Obenga, author of the important “La Philosophie Africaine de la période Pharonique,” (“African Philosophy in the Age of the Pharoahs”) or the . . . work by Professor Maulana Karenga on ancient Egyptian ethics.
The Press fanfare granted “Not Out Of Africa”, however, does demonstrate how noise can be confused with music. what is more worrisome is that it demonstrates a glee, although misinformed, of those who feel some sense of relief that a white scholar has taken on the Afrocentrists, a kind of white hope idea.
This stems, as I believe George Will has shown in his essay on the subject, from what is viewed as white salvation from the irrationality of Afrocentrists. It originates in an historical anti-African bias and Roger Kimball nearly gloated that readers would “savor” Lefkowitz’ “definitive dissection of Afrocentrism”.
Contrary to any definitive dissection of Afrocentrism what Prof Lefkowitz offered was a definitive exposure of the principal assumptions of a racial structure of classical knowledge. Prof Lefkowitz is conversant with many Greek sources but as she admits this is the first time that she has ventured into these waters.
This is unfortunate because she has created a false security among those who believe that Greece sprung like a miracle unborn and untaught. Bringing Frank Snowden in the discussion of the ancient world does not help because Professor Snowden’s book “Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Graeco-Roman Experience” is fatally flawed as a Eurocentric interpretation of the African past.
His objective was to demonstrate that Africans existed in the imaginations and experience of Greece and Rome. He succeeded in stripping all (power of) agency from Africans. The problem is that Ethiopia in the form of Nubia and Kemet (Egypt) existed thousands of years before there was a Greece or Rome. To start a discussion of the ancient world with 800BC is certainly poor scholarship. But Prof Lefkowitz reliance on Snowden is the least of her problems.
The book is badly written and terribly redundant as if she is in a hurry to enlarge a relatively poor argument. How many times can you really say that George GM James should not have used the term “stolen legacy” when he claimed that the Africans influenced the Greeks? Professor James certainly had just as much rhetorical justification as Professor Lefkowitz who chose the unsubtle title “Not Out Of Africa” probably for the same reason as Prof James called his book “Stolen Legacy”. Ruling classes always seek to promote and to maintain their ruling mythologies.
Prof Lefkowitz’ passion in trying to walk a tight rope between support of the false mythology of a Greek miracle and the facts of Egyptian influence on the early Greeks is telling. She seeks to minimise the role Egypt played in civilising Greece by claiming that only in art and architecture was there real influence.This flies in the face of the ancient observers and beneficiaries of the largesse of the Africans. Mary Lefkowitz’ “Not Out Of Africa” has demonstrated the tremendous power of a false idea especially when it is advanced in the halls of the Academy.
I have come to believe that it is a part of a larger falsification that encompasses the various right-wing ideologies that parade as truth. They are rooted in the same dogma: reason is the gift of the Greeks. The Greeks are Europeans, Europeans are white, white people gave the world reason and philosophy.
This is not only a bad idea it is a false idea.
It is a bad idea because it preaches a European triumphalism and it is a false idea because the historical record is contrary. Tragically the idea that Europeans have some different intellectual or scientific ability is accepted doctrine and some scholars will go to any length to try to uphold it. Usually, as Lefkowitz does, they commit four fundamental flaws. They attack insignificant or trivial issues to obscure the main points.
Professor Lefkowitz has three main axes to grind in her book. The first is that a student told her that she believed Socrates was black. The second is that the Greek gods came from Africa which she attributes to Martin Bernal, the author of “Black Athena”, and to Cheikh Anta Diop, the author of “The African Origin of Civilisation”.
The third is that freemasonry is the source of George James’ claim in his book “Stolen Legacy” that the Greeks got many of their major ideas from the Egyptians. The main point made by Afrocentrists is that Greece owes a substantial debt to Egypt and that Egypt was anterior to Greece and should be considered a major contributor to our current knowledge.
I think I can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black. I have never seen these ideas written by an Afrocentrist nor have I heard them discussed in any Afrocentric intellectual forums.
Professor Lefkowitz provides us with a hearsay incident which she probably reports accurately. It is not an Afrocentric argument. I believe that both Bernal and Diop have done admirable jobs making their own cases on the legendary origins of the Greeks and I believe that readers should go to the sources themselves to see whose case, theirs or Prof Lefkowitz’, is most plausible. I am convinced from my reading that the relationship between ancient Greece and Africa was closer and more familiar than Greece’s relationship to Northern Europe.
They will make assertion and offer their own interpretations as evidence. Lefkowitz makes a statement on page one of her book that: “In American universities today not everyone knows what extreme Afrocentrists are doing in their classrooms.” – Southern Times.