This is my response to the furore earlier this week about the claim made in the book, Brilliant Black British History, written by a Nigerian author and published by Bloomsbury, that Britain has always been a Black country, the first Brits were Black, and Stonehenge was built by Black people. A few years ago now archaeologists and DNA specialists provided some support for the assertion that the first Brits were Black when they analysed the DNA from Cheddar Man and concluded that he had black or dark coloured skin. However Cheddar Man dates from the Mesolithic, the period between the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. During the Neolithic Europe and Britain were settled by White skinned farmers from Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, who entered the continent via two routes, one which went up through the Balkans and another which went across North Africa then up through Spain to Britain. Stonehenge was built by Bronze Age White farmers. Even the suggestion that Cheddar Man was Black isn’t as secure as it is sometimes claimed to be. One of the team that analysed the DNA later issued a retraction, stating that it was impossible to tell what skin colour he had.
It’s clear why such a pseudo-historical claims should be made by Black authors and appeal to a Black readership. Black Brits identify with Britain and wish to see themselves in its history. But the appropriation of White history like this seems to ignore real Black history and Black achievement. For example, in Africa there were the historic great civilisations of Aksum, Meroe, Nubia and the Swahili, as well as the great Muslim states of the savannah and west Africa. And Black West Indians have also achieved much since the abolition of slavery. In the first generation after abolition there were Black politicians in these countries’ legislatures, elected by Black voters to defend them against the White planters.
Behind the claim that Black people built Stonehenge are various Afrocentric claims that are ultimately based on the theories of two 19th century White Brits, Gerald Massey and David Macritchie. Massey was a campaigner for Spiritualism and Christian Socialism, and was possibly the model for the hero of the novel Felix Holt: The Radical. He believed that Britain had originally been colonised by the Egyptians, who were responsible for the construction of Stonehenge and other monuments.
David Macritchie, on the other hand, believed that the first peoples of the British Isles were what he called ‘melanochroi’, a mixture of White Europeans and a dark-skinned people like Aboriginal Australians. The Black population was reinforced by waves of other dark-skinned invaders, such as Black Huns and Black Danes. It was this Black population that built the dolmens, henges and other Neolithic monuments. Other White writers claimed that the Inuit and the Chinese were originally Black. These theories were further elaborated in 1993 by Ahmed and Ibrahim Ali in their book, The Black Celts. They argued that before the Celts arrived to colonise Britain, the peoples of the British Isles were Blacks descended from the people of Ethiopia, who had moved into Europe via North Africa and Spain. This has been further developed by Indus Khamit Kush, who has claimed that Black Africans were the original Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Vietnamese, Thai, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, British and Americans. This last claim is particular noxious. There was a young Black woman complaining on social media a few months ago that Indigenous Americans were as racist as Whites. She’d been talking to one of them, and was outraged that they didn’t accept that Blacks were the original population of America. I can’t think of anything more likely to cause offence than telling a member of the American First Nations, who have suffered persecution, dispossession and displacement, that they weren’t the first people in America.
Some of the more extreme claims of the Afro-Centrists are extremely similar to those made by White supremacists. Regarding primacy as the first people of a nation or country, there’s more than a little similarity between these claims and a book published in 1978 in Paraguay, then under a quasi-Fascist dictatorship, that the Ache Indian people were descended from the Vikings. In the 19th or early 20th century, a German anthropologist claimed that one of the South African peoples must have been descended from the Vandals, the Germanic people that conquered and colonised part of Roman North Africa. You can go on, and add the way great North American Indian monuments, like the Serpent Mound in Ohio, were attributed to any number of civilisations except the Indians themselves. Or how the fortress at Great Zimbabwe was attributed to the Chinese and Arabs, rather than the local Shona people, who really built it.
And the Afrocentrist claim that Blacks have a unique, spiritual connection with the universe which grants them greater insight and intellectual abilities also seems to me to be very similar to some of the bizarre theories of the Germanic Neo-Pagan cults in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and Austria. One of these claimed that the Aryans had originally possessed ‘radio-telepathic’ organs, but these had been lost through interbreeding with the untermenschen.
Pseudo-historical claims that Blacks really built Stonehenge look harmless and liberal, because they’re advanced in the cause of Black liberation. But behind them there’s a very nasty edifice of racist pseudo-history and scholarship that should not be touched by the mainstream press.
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