Africa’s stolen legacy
Although Ancient Egypt, whose glorious past, well organized dynasties, sophisticated civilization, rich art, science and superb architecture are well known, European historians have, until recently, always insisted on leaving ancient Egypt out their studies of African history because they claim that its people were never part of black Africa.
The Egyptians of Pharaohnic times, it is argued, were not Negroes; they were therefore not Africans, meaning that their civilization, no matter how firmly implanted it was on African soil, or how deeply immersed it was in African mythology, it should not be included in the African context.
This is a patently clear indication of how long Europeans have been in denial about Africa’ immeasurable contribution to the world in every known sphere of life’s endeavours.
In his scholarly and important book, Africa in History, this is how Basil Davidson, a white Zimbabwean, dismisses this perception: “It has become clear that the familiar attribution of the term ‘white’ to North African stocks (as of the term ‘black’ to other African stocks) is really little more than another mystification of the racist sort. All such categorizations should be dismissed. Consider only the strange case of the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis,’ another myth dear to the epoch of imperialism.
“In countless books and lectures it was preached that any signs of past progress detectable among Africans must have been the fruit of outside intrusion, of intrusion from the north: more exactly of ‘white’ intrusion from Europe.
“This derivative form of the ‘Africans-have- no civilization’ myth was best offered in a scientific guise by a British anthropologist, C.G. Seligman, in a book of 1929 (The Races of Africa), much admired then and after.”
On the insistence by European historians that the people of Ancient Egypt were not black Africans, this is what Davidson has to say: “This view has little to be said for it. If it now seems perfectly clear that the vast majority of pre-dynastic Egyptians were of continental African stock, and even of central-western Saharan origins, there is likewise serious dispute among the authorities even as to whether the hypothetical ‘dynastic race’ associated with the foundation of Pharaonic Egypt had come from outside Africa.
“These early populations undoubtedly included the descendants of incoming immigrants from the Near East. But to argue from this that the vast majority of the inhabitants of old Egypt, not being ‘Negro’, were therefore not African is as little tenable as to argue the same about the Berbers and the Ethiopians, whom nobody has yet proposed to erase from the list of African peoples.
“The old racist categories of ‘white’ and ‘black’ can indeed make no sense in this or perhaps any other connection. Thus the Berbers have been often referred to as a ‘white race.’
“Yet it is ‘quite impossible’, in Capot-Rey’s most expert view, ‘to speak of a Berber race. Either one means, in using this term, a language spoken with much the same grammar and vocabulary from the Mediterranean to the Niger, or one means a moral and material civilization.’ Whatever their pigmentation, or physical appearance, the Egyptians of Pharaonic times were an intimate part of African history.”
Excerpted from an article by Olley Maruma for The Southern Times
- Passport To The World: Show Me Africa!
- Bring the "Dark Continent" to Light!
- Choir Kids Are Celebrating Africa!!
