> Back in the mid-nineties there was a smear campaign disguised as a
> question of scholarship mounted on Martin Bernal's Black Athena. The
> charge was led (among others) by Mary Lefkowitz, a Classics scholar
> who wrote a refutation called, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism
> Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.
> This issue was heavily, exhaustively, and authoritatively debated by
> academics and scholars on several e-lists.
Have you looked at Stephen Howe's book, Chuck? Note that it was published by Verso, not exactly a neo-con publisher. [1] Howe, Stephen, 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes, London/New York: Verso, first published 1998. http://www.geocities.com/warriorvase/short.htm#_ftn1 A short defence of Afrocentrism in the light of Stephen Howe's 1998 book by Wim van Binsbergen [ the text below is a contribution by Wim van Binsbergen to a debate on Afrocentrism, published in Politique Africaine, Nov. 2000 ]
Stephen Howe’s book[1] is in the first place a contribution to intellectual history, and as such it is an excellent piece of scholarship. Its breadth of argument and the depth of reading supporting it are most impressive. Afrocentrism is one of the first books to map out in detail,
from its remoter origins to its contemporary ramifications and high-profile manifestations, one of the most significant intellectual and political movements of the world today.
Unmistakably the author intends his book to constitute Afrocentrism’s definitive denunciation. His motivation is alarm over what he (with many others, foremost Mary Lefkowitz)[2] sees as the sell-out of intellectual and moral values for the sake of Black, mainly African American, consciousness-raising.
One cannot help agreeing with Howe’s (and Lefkowitz’s) identification of the deficiencies endemic to that genre: the poor scholarship; the amateurish, autodidactic approach to grand historical and comparative themes without systematic use of obvious sources and obvious methods; the Afrocentrist authors’ manifest and deliberate isolation from current debates and current advances in the fields of scholarship they touch on; and the occasional lapses into Black racism. On all these points Howe has very sensible things to say.
However, where Howe and I fundamentally disagree is with regard to the extent of dismission that Afrocentrism calls for. For Howe, Afrocentrism is largely what in our Marxist days we used to call false consciousness: a view of reality which is systematically distorted and which can be explained from the historical trajectory traversed, in recent centuries, by the collectivity holding these views. Where Howe finds Afrocentrism by and large intolerable it is because, in the context of the politics of identity on which the postmodern world revolves, it is no longer politically correct, yea it is more and more even politically impossible, to publicly ignore or dismiss the Afrocentrist claims; hence their increasing influence in the U.S.A. educational system. For Howe (p. 6), as for me, the central issue here is explicitly the truth value of Afrocentrism.
Howe asserts himself as one primarily interested in the politics of history writing, but he fails to elaborate on the formidable philosophical question of what constitutes truth in historical analysis. If yet he insists on calling the Afrocentric version of history, mythical, he sadly misses the opportunity of exploring the possibly mythical dimensions of mainstream historiography.
For Howe the truth value of Afrocentrism is zero, in other words Afrocentrism is entirely mythical. For me,[3] very much to the contrary, Afrocentrism (despite its endemic defects) does contain a kernel of truth, in the form of testable hypotheses about the possible contributions which Africans may have made towards the world-wide development of human culture. Such a position has important political and critical implications. For if there is even the remotest possibility that some of the Afrocentrist tenets (however unscholarly in their present elaboration and substantiation) might yet be confirmed when restated in a scholarly manner and investigated with state-of-the-art scientific methods, then the wholesale dismissal of Afrocentrism cannot simply be the positive, enlightened gesture Howe (or Lefkowitz) claim it to be. Such dismissal risks to be a confirmation of the status quo, a continuation of the processes of exclusion to which Black people, inside and outside Africa, have been subjected for centuries. Here there is a political role to be played by the odd person out: the scholar and polemicist who for lack of Black or African antecedents cannot be suspected of being on a mere conscious-raising trip, and who yet, for respectable scholarly reasons, defends views similar to or identical with those of the Afrocentrists. Martin Bernal’s has been such a case, inevitably denounced by Howe.
Historiographic usage offers a number of ready answers to the fundamental question: By what method and with what validity and reliability do we construct images of the past? For Howe, and for many historians like him who situate themselves in the empiricist tradition while being suspicious of an over-reliance on systematic theory, a central methodological approach is that of ‘common sense’, an appeal to the self-validating effect of simple everyday logic and common (i.e. North Atlantic, Western) everyday concepts. Inevitably (since everyday common perspectives are by definition intersubjective, shared with others and recognised to be so shared) a common sense appeal would favour the paradigms as taken for granted in a given discipline at a given moment of time.
It has been Bernal’s merit[4] to make us aware of the immense historical and political significance of one such historiographic paradigm, whose demolition has been the purpose of his Black Athena project:
(a) ‘Greek classical culture was essentially independent from any inputs
from the Ancient Near East (Anatolia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia)’.
In connection with Afrocentrism, three other such historical paradigms have been dominant throughout the second half of the twentieth century:
(b) ‘Ancient Egypt, although situated on the edge of the African continent, was essentially a non-African civilisation whose major achievements in the fields of religion, social, political and military organisation, architecture and other crafts, the sciences etc., were largely original and whose historical cultural indebtedness lay, if anything, with West Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa’
(c) ‘Ancient Egypt did not have a profound, lasting, and therefore traceable impact on the African continent, particularly not on sub-Saharan Africa’
(d) ‘Contemporary Africa is a patchwork quilt of numerous distinct local cultures, each supported by a distinct language and each giving rise to a distinct ethnic identity, in the light of which broad perspectives on continental cultural continuity going back to the remoter past much be relegated to the realm of ideology and illusion’
Phrased in this way, these paradigms, although largely taken for granted by the scholars working in their context, are in principle testable hypotheses. Although they are not intrinsically ideological, unmistakably they well attuned to a hegemonic North Atlantic perspective on the world. They postulate a world which is neatly compartmentalised; incomparably more so than would be suggested not only by the globalising experience of our own time, but also by the demonstrable spread of agricultural techniques, weaponry, musical instruments, languages, belief systems including world religions, formal systems such as board games, divination methods, myths and symbolism, across the African continent and in considerable (though painfully understudied) continuity with the rest of the Old World, and even the New World. Under such compartmentalisation, a whole mythical geopolitics comes into being: the mystery and mystique of Europe — more recently: of the North Atlantic in general — can be maintained as a solid ideological power base for colonialism and postcolonial hegemony; Egypt, Africa, African cultures, remain the ultimate other, to the North Atlantic, but also to one another; a conceptual and geopolitical ‘divide and rule’ keeps them in their subordinate place vis-à-vis the North Atlantic; and the basic flow of achievement is defined as going from north to south, while the hegemonically undesirable idea of counter-flows in a northerly direction is ruled out. These may be testable hypothesis, but they are very close to geopolitical myths. <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese