Afrocentricity, Multiculturalism, and Black Athena
Robert W Wallace
The Afrocentric movement now influential in North American primary and
secondary schools is arguably the most important and challenging development
in higher education since the curricular reforms of the nineteen-sixties 1. This movement is currently informed by two different and contrasting orientations: multicultural, and what may be called »Afro-Hellenic». In its multicultural orientation,
Afrocentrism is grounded in ethnic and cultural diversity, within the framework
of contemporary society. By contrast, »Afro-Hellenism», which attributes to Africa
many of the accomplishments traditionally associated with the ancient Greeks,
is abstract, intellectual, and grounded in the traditional orientations of Western
civilization. The argument of this essay is that Afro-Hellenism is in fact, as it seems,
paradoxical. As a proposition it is difficult to defend on historical grounds. As a
political concept it is retrograde and counterproductive.
The movement toward multiculturalism in the United States is in part the
result of increased immigration to the U.S. especially from Central America, the
Caribbean and Southeast Asia. It is also, in part, the result of conflicting attitudes
toward non-whites felt by many white Americans: attitudes that continue to reflect an element of racism, excluding non-whites from full partidpation in American
society despite ideologies of the »melting pot. »Racism remains an issue not least
in primary and secondary education. When American public schools began to
be desegregated in the 1960s, many Southern whites left these schools to establish private» academies», often called» Christian» , as for example (in a community
I know) the «Liberty Christian Academy». Extraordinarily, »Christian» is a code
word, meaning that blacks are not welcome. In 1980, although blacks constituted
only 10 percent of the American population, more than two thirds ofblack children
attended schools that were more than 50% black. In integrated schools these
children are often treated poorly, placed in remedial sections or tracked into vocational areas. Racism, of course, also remains a factor in American society generally. A recent book has argued that in fact most white Americans are affected by
racist thinking, believing (for example) that blacks are probably intellectually
inferior to whites 2. In part as a consequence of racism, America has not been
able to solve the problem of a large urban black underclass, whose conditions,
of crime and drugs and teenage pregnancies, are steadily deteriorating 3.
45
African Americans have met this desperate situation in part in a positive way,
by the so-called «politics of difference-, through new identifications based ,on
their status as outsiders, essentially by turning back to their roots - ?y weanng
African dress, by taking African names and religions, by promoting high schools
reserved for black males, and by Afrocentric curricula. A similar phenomenon
has emerged, in varying degrees, among Hispanic, South East Aslan, and o~her
communities of recent immigrants. In varying degrees, mainstream Amenca.n
society has been receptive to these developments. Although sprung froJ? econ~rmc
and political tragedy and the racial divisions and moral failures of Amencan soclety,
multiculturalism should be defended and ~ommonly (although by no mea~s
universally) is defended, as a positive force, in schools and universities and ~
society generally. Although not free ofthe potential for adverse social co~equences ,
multiculturalism enriches and broadens America's cultural perspectives. In the
global village it promotes international understanding and communication with
other cultures 5.
By contrast, within the Afrocentric movement the roots of Afro-Hellenism
are grounded in the traditional respect that Western society accords to the Gre~ks
and to Greek culture of the period 700-300 B.C.E. At its basis, Afro-Hellemsm
claims that many of the greatest «achievements- of Greek culture during this ~riod
were in fact derived from black Africa. Afro-Hellenism has also had a difflCult
birth, in large part because its advocates have not been trained Classicis~ ~r a~­
chaeologists. As a result, some exponents of this orientation have made ~ludl­
cious statements about the connections between Africa and Greece, and thlS has
given the opponents of Afrocentrism sticks to beat them with. Th.us for example,
in a recent article in the New Republic Professor Mary Lefkowltz of Wellesley
College writes of an unhappy and even hostile student in her class oD: Plato a~d
Socrates who later explained that Lefkowitz had been guilty of a senous orms.sion. An~ther instructor had told her that Socrates (as suggested by his flat nose)
was black. This other instructor also noted that Classicists always refuse to mention the African origins of Socrates and Greek culture generally, in o.rder to conceal that -the legacy of ancient Greece· was stolen from Egypt 6: In C~cago wh~re
I teach three times this fall my lecture-survey of early EgyptIan hlStOry was mterrupt~d by a student who claimed that I was -totally d~storting. Egypti~n history by not mentioning that the Egyptians wer: black. (This s~dent stated ill class
that archaeologists had burned black mumrrues to conceal t~lS fact.) The 350 S?called Afrocentric schools in the U.S., as well as the publtc school systems m
DetrOit, Washington, and other predominantly black cities, ~re heavily influ~nced
by a set of documents, called the -African-~erican~~selille Essays., which attribute to black Africans much of Greek SClence, reltglon, and phllosophy, and
which also defend the scientific validity ofparapsychology, astrology, and religion.
That the Egyptians were black is a cardinal tenet of Afro-~ellenism. Black also
were Cleopatra, Hannibal, Euclid, Eratosthenes (as a natIve of Cyrene), J~sus,
even Pushkin and Beethoven (one of his ancestors was apparently Moonsh).
Irnhotep who invented the pyramids was black; the Pythagorean theorem, the
concept of pi, geometric formulas, the concept of th~ screw ~nd th~ lev~r all came
from Africa. The claim has been advanced that dunng the flrst rmllemum B.C.E.
46
tl1e Egyptians invented the glider (based on the painting of a falcon which a passing English businessman mistook for a model airplane). It has even been said
that Napoleon personally shot offthe nose of the Sphinx so it would not be recognized as African 7.
These exaggerations have done the cause of Afrocentrism no benefit. In 1987,
however, Rutgers University Press published the first volume of a more serious
defense ofAfro-Hellenism, in what will be a four-part series entitled Black Atbena:
The Afroasiatic Roots ofClassical Civilization, by Martin Bernal 8 . The arguments
in these books now constitute much of the contemporary intellectual underpinnings of Afro-Hellenism. Bernal, a British emigre to the U.S., teaches East Asian
governments at Cornell. He states that in 1975, as a consequence of a mid-life
crisis, he began to seek out his own ethnic heritage, which was partly Jewish 0,
xii-xiii); in addition, his grandfather Sir Alan Gardiner wrote what remains the
standard dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language. Proclaiming hin1self 0, 3)
an amateur in the tradition of Champollion (who deciphered the Egyptian Rosetta
Stone) and Michael Ventris (who deciphered the Cretan-Mycenean syllabary Linear
B), Bernal made (as he thought) two fundamental discoveries. The first was a
marked and deliberate racism and anti-Semitism among generations of scholars
of Greco-Roman antiquity. In his saddening chronicle of this Bernal is devastating. His discussion is a notable contribution to Western intellectual history. To
quote just two statements cited by Bernal that from this perspective may exemplify
the whole, J. A. de Gobineau, the author of Essai sur l'inegalite des races bumaines
0853-55), wrote that -the black variety [of persons]. is the lowest and lies at the
bottom of the ladder. The animal character lent to its basic form imposes its destiny from the moment of conception. It never leaves the most restricted intellectual zones· (1,241). Ernest Renan, also a 19th-century French scholar and director of the College de France, st<1ted, -the Semitic race is to be recognized almost
entirely by negative characteristics. It has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science,
nor philosophy. (I, 346). Examples of racism and anti-Semitism in Classical scholarship can be multiplied ad nauseam. I myselfwas taught in school that the Romans
were blond-haired. Indeed, until recen~y it was not uncommon for anthropologists
to deny the African origins of humanity. Bernal attributes the success of Black
Atbena to racism, since he is white, middle-class and mainstream. The earlier
books of the Senegalese natural scientist Cheikh Anta Diop were largely ignored 9.
In contrast to Diop and others, however, Bernal knows the rules of the academic
game, and uses the format of traditional scholarship, with evidence, argument,
and bibliography. He hin1self has also said that his work has been accepted over
his predecessors because it is -coherent. 10.
Bemal's second discovery was of a different order: that racist and anti-Semitic
scholarship concealed and continues to conceal the historical fact that from the
Bronze Age onwards, Greek culture was essentially the product of two invasions
by Egyptians and Levantines. According to Bernal, the Egyptians first irtvaded
and conquered both Boeotia (a region in Greece to me north of Athens) and
the Mediterranean island of Crete late in the third millenium. To document the
invasion of Boeotia, Bernal adduces three main data 0, 18): the name Thebes,
in both Boeotia and Egypt associated with a sphinx; the sophisticated drainage
47
system used in Boeotia's Lake Copais; and finally a flat-topped tumulus in Boeo~ian
Thebes which one of its excavators thought was similar to the stepped pyranuds.
To defend his idea of an Egyptian invasion of Crete at this same time (that is,
that •a succession of Upper Egyptian black pharoahs sharing the name Menthot~­
[I, 18] colonized Crete and established the Minoan culture), Bernal adduces m
particular the Cretan development of palatial architecture around 2000 B.C.E.,
and similarities between the Cretan bull cult and the Egyptian bull cult of Mont.
The Cretan king Minos he identifies with the first Egyptian pharoah, Menes
er,
63-64).
According to Bemal, a second invasion of Greeceoccurred early in the se~o~d
millenium, by Phoenicians (that is to say, Levantine Semitic-speakers: this 1S ~n­
dicated by the traditions about the Phoenician Kadmos), and by the Hyksos, mhabitants of lower Egypt, originally from Syria and now expelled from Egypt. These
invaders brought with them many things, such as the horse-and-chariot, and also
the alphabet (.the latest the alphabet could have reached the Aegean is the middle of the second millenium- n, 16]). They made major contributions to the Greek
vocabulary that help to establish their presence in Greece. Mycenean and l~ter
Greek culture, Bernal says, is essentially the culture of Levantine and Egypuan
Hyksos invaders, as the Greeks themselves knew. It was ·the conventional iew
among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. that •Greek culture had ansen
as the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who
had civilized the native inhabitants"
1).
The evaluation of these arguments is complicated first because our political sympathies against the terrible wrong of racism may in some cases clash -with
the reasonable and legitimate standards of scholarly argumentation, and second
because important contacts certainly did exist between Greece, Egypt and the
Levant, as for many years a number of distinguished Classical scholars have
demonstrated 11. Determining the extent and the significance of these contacts,
and of Egyptian and Near Eastern influences on the Greeks, is a question necessarily requiring great learning in a number of different fields, and a fine sense
of historical distinctions. Not trained in any of these areas, however, Bernal has
produced an ideological program rather than a careful scholarly analysis. This
is doubly unfortunate, first because a legitimate argument can be made for at least
part of the general hypothesis which he has developed, and second because his
work can only add to the confusion surrounding this topic (which it may even
serve to discredit). Here I can present only the briefest outline of the difficulties
Bernal's hypotheses involve.
The main problem is that of the ancient evidence. Concerning Bernal's main
arguments for an Egyptian invasion of Boeotia during the late third rnillenium,
it must be pointed out that sophisticated irrigation systems were known in many
places besides Egypt, and in any case their presence need not showrnilitary conquest 12. The argument from names (Thebes) could equally show that the Greeks
colonized the city of Athens in the American state of Georgia. If historical, an
Egyptian conquest of Boeotia in the third millenium should have left some material
sign, in the form of Egyptian objects, in tombs or elsewhere. But there are none.
Bernal is prepared for this objection, asserting (what is not entirely true) that the
v.
er,
48
er,
area is largely unexcavated
9). The response to this can only be that before
claiming an Egyptian invasion, he should wait for adequate evidence.
Concerning the Egyptian and Levantine conquest of Greece in the second
millenium, Bernal adduces three categories of evidence: archaeology, myth,
and linguistic borrowings. The archaeological evidence he provides is both
limited and of uncertain significance. The argument based on the derivation
of Cretan palace-construction from Egypt ignores the possibility of independent development. Furthermore, all such parallels might be the result of trade
or other forms of contact, not conquest. Bernal invariably selects high dates
for materials from Egypt and the Near East, to show that influence went from
Egypt to Crete. Lower dates would mean that cultural influence went in the other
direction. Although Greece is supposed to have had the alphabet by 1500, no
examples of it occur until the eighth century, although many texts in Linear A
and Linear B are preserved. Bernal defends his belief that the Mycenean shaft
graves contain the bodies of Hyksos invaders by the claim that the moustaches
and· strong" beards on faces represented on Mycenean masks and two Cretan
seals are similar to that on a painted rhyton found at Jericho. But the Jericho
representation has no moustache and the beards are in fact dissimilar 13. Only
one Egyptian object, a scarab, has been found in a shaft grave, a late one at
Mycenae.
Bernal's case also rests heavily on myth and legend. Thus the Greeks told
that King Danaos moved from Egypt to Argos and became King of the Danaans;
Herodotos says that the Spartan kings traced their ancestors back to Egypt, and
that the Phoenicians inhabited Boeotia and taught the locals many things including writing. Bernal interprets these stories as memories of an Egyptian and
Pheonician invasion 1000 years earlier. But of what historical value are myths
and legends? The Thebans believed they were sprung from dragon's teeth; the
Athenians that they were autochthonous; nineteenth-century Germans that the
Romans had blond hair. Simply to claim the historical veracity of one's favorite
.
myth is obviously a doubtful methodology.
On the issue of language, Bernal claims that up to 25% of Greek is ofSemitic
origin, and another 20-25% is of Egyptian origin xiv). However, his demonstrations of this, his suggested etymologies, are based only on superficial word
resemblances rather than principles of linguistic adaptation. Many specific derivations seem inherently implausible 14. Thus psyche, the Greek word for soul, is
derived from Egyptian sw, a «parasol- or «shelter-; the winged horse Pegasos is
derived from pgw, ·a jug for washing-; «Lacedaimon. (= Sparta) is etymologized
as «The Howling/Gnawing Spirit., that is, Anubis 53; IT ch. 6); the name Athens,
Athenai, he derives not from some indigenous pre-Greek form but from the
Egyptian goddess Nt or Neit, in the form Ht Nt, the «Temple of Neit· - and hence
•Black Athena - 51-52, II ch. 5). These are clearly just amateurish guesses, none
provable. Even if some Greek words were derived from Egypt, this could have
occurred by borrowing, not conquest.
The essential problem posed by Black Athena lies in Bernal's unwillingness
critically to evaluate the data. Though he purports to be playing by the rules of
scholarship, in fact his methodology is not guided by a complete or objective
er,
er,
er,
49
evaluation of complex or conflicting evidence. Rather, anything, ancient or
modem, that supports his general position is accepted without critical examination, while conflicting materials are ignored or summarily denied. A central example of this concerns the racial status of the ancient Egyptians. Bernal's single
ancient text stating that Egyptians were black is a passage in Herodotos (2.104),
where Herodotos guesses that the people of Colchis were of Egyptian origins
because they were black-skinned (melagcbroes) and had wooly hair (oulotricbes).
T? accept this testimony, obviously we must answer three questions. First, what
did Herodotos mean by black and wooly-haired? Second, is his testimony supported or corroborated by external data? And third, how reliable was Herodotos
as a source? On the ftrst point, on the meaning of melagcbroes and oulotricbes,
the most distinguished African American Classicist, Professor Frank Snowden of
Howard University, has argued that references to •black» Egyptians in Herodotos,
Aeschylus and Aristotle were only to swarthy complexions, to people darker than
the Greeks themselves: Greeks called true blacks .Ethiopians» 15. Herodotos
describes Ethiopians as having hair woolier than that of any other people on earth
(7.70), and several times he distinguishes Ethiopians from Egyptians (2.30,2.42,
cf. 3.19). The Greek's different sense of colorfromours is well known: thus they
called the sea ,purple., faces ·green·, and both wine and the earth .black· 16 .
As for Herodotos's oulotricbes, .wooly hair., the Greeks did not limit this to negroids. Twice in the Odys:stry, for example, Odysseus is said to have had oulas komas
(6.. 231, 23.158). On the issue of whether Herodotos is corroborated by other
eVId~~ce, fuller and more detailed descriptions of the Egyptians are supplied by
Manilms.( 4-?72-30): Strabo 05.1.13) and other ancient authors. Manilius says,
•The EthiopIans stam the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness'
less sun-burnt are the natives of India; the land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile:
darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its ftelds: it is a country
nearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone» (trans. G. Gould).
Stra.bo notes that southern Indians resemble Ethiopians in color, and northern
In~Ians the EID'?tian~. None of these passages is mentioned by Bernal. Finally,
third, Herodotos s test:unony is not automatically reliable. In Book 2 of his Histories
on Egypt, he writes of flying snakes (2.75), hippopotamoses with horses' mane~
(2.71), and vast unsupported stone ceilings in a labyrinth of 3000 rooms which
Herodotos swears he has personally inspected (2.148). For these and other
reasons, DetlefFeWing and Kimball Arrnayor have argued that Herodotos never
aetu~y tra~e~ed t? Egypt or elsewhere 17. Since in their iconography the Egyptians
routInely dIStInguIshed themselves from black Africans - evidence also nowhere
menti~:>ned.or discussed by Bernal- Herodotos's statement about black Egyptian
Colchians IS a very thin reed on which to build a contrary argument.
. On the racial status of the Egyptians, central to Afro-Hellenism, Bernal in
fact c0nt:uses the issue. Although he admits that Nefertiti is represented as
CaucasoId and that Cleopatra was probably Greek, his several injudicious
statements - beginning with the title Black-Atbena - about. black pharoahs» 0
241) and Her~dotos's c?nception of the Egyptians as black 0,52-53), imply ~
black Egypt. Listen to hIS summation 0, 241-242}
50
To what. race·, then, did the Ancient Egyptians belong? I am very dubious of the utility
of the concept· race- in general... I am even more skeptical about the possibility of fmding an answer in this particular case. Research on the question usually reveals far more
about the predisposition of the researcher than about the question itself. Nevertheless...
I believe that Egyptian civilization was fundamentally African... Furthermore, I am convinced that many of the most powerful Egyptian dynasties... were made up of pharoahs
whom one can usefully call black.
Jasper Griffin has rightly called attention to the obscurities of this passage 18.
The concept of race, Bernal begins, is •not useful., but Egyptian civilization was
•fundamentally African» (what does that mean?), and to call many pharoahs black
is .useful». Does .useful- mean it is true? Bernal admits that after proposing the
name -Black Athena. for his volume, he came to prefer .African Athena •. His
publisher, however, insisted on .Black Athena. because the combination of blacks
and women would sell 19. This is a poor excuse for misleading his readers.
Five criticisms of Black Atbena may be raised on a more general level. First
and above all, Bemal's approach is fundamentally Eurocentric. He does not attempt to show that the accomplishments or cultures of African or Levantine
societies were different from those of Greece, but only that they were earlier.
Greece remains the model, the cultural icon.
Second, although Bernal brilliantly surveys the appalling literary record of
racism and anti-Semitism in Classical scholarship after 1785, he does not discuss
or evaluate the scholarly llterature from this period, which presented new evidence
or new arguments about early history and civilization. However, these materials
were fundamental to the development ofthe modem conceptions of those topics 20.
Third, Bemal's approach is substantially diffusionist and anti-evolutionary:
Greek culture was largely the sum of the Greek's Afroasiatic heritage, which
remained little changed for over 1000 years. In Bernal the Greeks seem merely
displaced Phoenicians and Egyptians 21. But the cultural uniqueness of the Greeks
or of any people is not just a proposition of racist archaeology. Opinions may
vary on the merits of Greek society: violent and militaristic, based on slavery,
oppressive to women, even phallocentric 22. Yet whatever one thinks of them,
the Greeks and Greek civilization after 750 B.C.E. were unique, constantly learning from others, but making what they learned their own. Egyptian culture was
fundamentally distinct. Nothing in Egyptian writings parallels the growth of critical thought, the divergence of philosophy into many conflicting schools, or the
speculative and inquiring humanism characteristic of the sophistic movement.
The model for Bernal's hypothesis is in fact Western cultural imperialism, inverted.
In his view, the Egyptians imposed their culture on an indigenous population
by the force of conquest.
Finally, his approach is itself an example of inverse racism. To claim, tout
court, that Greek culture derives from black Egypt is as distorted and potentially as dangerous as the claim that it derived from blond-haired Aryans. Bernal
himself has countenanced this claim: •I hate racism of any kind, but I think white
racism is much more frightening» than black racism 23.
Much of the explanation for the appeal of Black Atbena derives from the
wider cultural phenomenon of Afrocentrism which it is helping to fuel. The goal
51
of increasing Western comprehension of non-Western cultures is entirely laudable.
But Bernal's irresponsible scholarship in the service of Afro-Hellenism has decreased that comprehension. It also contributes to racial tensions and to social,
cultural, and educational fragmentation, as the legitimate objections to his theories
of those actually competent in ancient history and archaeology merely seem further examples of racism. Frantz Fanon has rightly observed, «the historical necessity in which men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims and
to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them
up a blind alley» 24.
If these issues were not so important, Bemal might be remembered as another
amateur eccentric in the tradition ofVelikowsky (cf. I, 6), writing enormous books
on personal and idiosyncratic theories. However, Bernal is a sophisticated intellectual who has read the criticisms against him and yet persists, despite the
critical rejection of his reconstructions by virtually everyone who is trained to
judge them. What is his motivation? When he remarks that it is «useful. to consider Egyptians black, this suggests a political agenda, and Bernal has been not
uncandid about this. His political purpose, he says, is to -lessen European cultural arrogance» (I, 73). -Blacks have been told they never had a great civilization, and therefore never will. 25. Consciously, he may think that if he can drive
the dialogue out to an extreme, the center itself will shift. But his interior motivations must in fact be confused. Since Bernal himself has framed his quest in
psychoanalytic and mythological terms, as that of an outsider, undergoing a
psychological crisis, searching out his roots and arriving to destroy a tradition,
it may therefore be legitimate (despite the obvious dangers of speculative
psychohistory) to ponder the relevance of certain elmentary myth910gicalpsychological models, of Oedipus aginst Laios, Jesus against Herod, Moses against
the pharoah. That is, a son, of uncertain parentage, comes from outside to overthrow the king who was his father, but who earlier had not acknowledged him
and who had tried to kill him.
Sister Souljah remarked with some justice: -two wrongs may not make a right,
but they sure make it even·. Yet conscious error for political purposes will surely not help the cause of -emerging. peoples, or the communities in which they
live. Any student who is taught that Socrates was black, or that the Egyptians invented airplanes, will ultimately be embarassed, as Professor Lefkowitz's student
was. Lefkowitz concludes: «to the extent that Bernal has helped to provide an
apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be held
culpable, even if his intentions are honorable and his motives sincere .. (n. 6 above,
p. 35). The discussion provoked by Black Athena has had the great merit of inducing many intellectuals to broaden their perspectives, to incorporate the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and elsewhere in courses entitled «The Ancient
World .. , These are fundamental goals. The tragedy of Black Athena is that it both
obscures and politicizes centrally important subjects: the interconnections of the
great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Minoan Crete, Palestine and Greece;
the absence of racial prejudice or racial consciousness in ancient societies 26; the
contributions of blacks in the great and multiracial Egyptian civilization; and, not
least, the accomplishments of the Greeks. Racially oriented (rather than multi-
52
culturalist) scholarship must surely be abandoned, as divisive and intelle~al­
ly senseless. Most Egyptians were light brown Afri~ans. ~ost Gr~eks were hght
brown Europeans, who merely left sub-Saharan Afnca a httle earher. In our c?mmon African origin, we are all Afrocentrists. A balanced and accurate exammation of the issues raised by Bernal, of the debt which Greece owed to the nonGreek world, would be a major contribution to scholarship, and a service to
humanity. But that job remains to be done.
Robert W. Wal1ace
a sraduate of Oxford and Harvard, is Associate Profe~sor
Of Classics and Ancient History at Northwestern, and ts
the author ofHarmonia Mundi: Music and Philosophy
in the Ancient World
53