I’ve posted up a number of pieces attacking Afrocentrism and its whacky and ahistorical ideas. Afrocentrism has its roots in 19th century Black American authors, who believed that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation. I don’t think at the time this was an unreasonable claim. Watching some of the videos by Afrocentrists on YouTube, it appears they got some of their ideas from contemporary scholarly writings. One such video began by asserting that Champollion, the French linguist who finally cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed they were a Black civilisation. The ancient Egyptians in their art clearly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans, but not as dark as the Nubians, whom they depicted as really Black. Where it becomes unreasonable is when it asserts that ancient Egypt was the fount and source of Greek, and hence western civilisation, and claims that Black people were the original inhabitants of Britain, America, Vietnam, China, Japan and elsewhere.
There’s also a very strong belief in the Black community that Jesus must have been Black. At one level it’s kind of natural, as White Europeans have seen him in the terms of their own race, and portrayed him as White. He wasn’t either, of course. The Jews were a Semitic people, related to the Arabs and other related peoples in the Middle East, such as the Assyrians and Aramaeans. Hebrew is very closely related to Ugaritic, the ancient language of Byblos now in Syria. Christ would have had an olive complexion like these people, rather than that of a sub-Saharan Black African.
But there are rumours that a Black director is planning a film about Christ, in which not only Our Lord but everyone in Jerusalem will be Black. I don’t know if this will include Pontius Pilate, who was a White Roman. This seems to follow Black racial doctrine rather than historical reality.
But the desire to promote all the Biblical figures as Black Africans seems to have gone a step further. I found a video yesterday of a group of Black people discussing a video they had found claiming that the various locations in the Bible were really in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, the video they were discussing claimed it was on the border with Namibia.
This is bonkers, but no more bonkers than Ahmed Osman, who claimed that the Bible had really been set in Saudi Arabia, or the 19th century British author E. Cummings Beaumont. Beaumont had decided that the various states and civilisations in the Bible couldn’t possibly be those of the modern countries of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. No! Those ancient nations could only have been located in modern Britain. I found a copy of his book once in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and haven’t been able to find it since. It’s a classic of barmy literature.
Behind these claims are ethno-nationalism and the idea that only one’s own people are sufficiently great and noble enough to have been these great nations. In the case of Afrocentrism, it’s partly a backlash against the extremely low view of Black people as a race and their civilisations and cultures up to the middle of the 20th century. The Black American founders of Afrocentrism wrote their books in order to show that Blacks were also capable of creating great civilisations like ancient Egypt, and were therefore the equal of Whites. It’s an entirely noble motive, but has led to the appropriation of the history and achievements of other cultures. Early this week I found a video by Black American conservative Amala Ekponobi in which she put right a video by a smug American Black girls claiming that the Amerindians were wrong and Blacks were the first people in America.
There is a problem in that in America, Afrocentrism has entered the academy with universities teaching courses on it. And it seems to be influencing Black history over here, as when a book on Black British history claimed that Black people had built Stonehenge.
This needs to be stopped, and genuine history taught instead of racial, and racist myths.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 