Like What Our Peasants Still Are

Landeg White

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes by Stephen Howe
Verso, 337 pp, £22.00, June 1998, ISBN 1 85984 873 7

Did Napoleon mutilate the nose of the Great Sphinx because he thought it looked too ‘African’? Is the star Sirius B a storehouse of energy and information transmitted specifically to people whose bodies are rich in melanin? Are Christmas trees, chocolate bars, baseballs, Spanish bulls (and what’s done to them by way of chopping, biting, thwacking and impaling) all symbols of black male genitalia? Was the white race produced by women lepers who fled to the Caucasus and coupled with jackals? Do surnames like Dunn, Grey and Douglas, and place-names like Dublin and Blackpool, indicate concealed African origins? Were the Mende people of West Africa the first to navigate to Peru? Did Egyptians build Stonehenge? Is Aids the outcome of a genocidal white conspiracy to eliminate Africans? More to the point, do you believe these are serious questions, requiring patient and scholarly rebuttal?

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Vol. 21 No. 10 · 13 May 1999 » Landeg White » Like What Our Peasants Still Are (print version)
Pages 7-8 | 2809 words

Letters

From Andrew Horn

Landeg White's defence of the anti-historicity of extreme Afrocentrism (LRB, 13 May) seems disingenuous. He argues that, in the end, because it affects only 'Black Studies departments, those sealed academic ghettos created by affirmative action', such irrationality is not 'dangerous'. Would he say the same if Protestant British-Israelism took a foothold in English Studies programmes and intimidated scholars who could not accept the claim that the British are the Lost Tribes? Or if German departments were pressured by adamant proponents of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's race theories?

Andrew Horn
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute<br />Harvard University

From Stephen Howe

Landeg White objects to the claim I make in Afrocentrism that false or mythical beliefs cannot possibly be helpful to oppressed people. These, he says, 'are the words of a political philosopher, not a historian' and one 'who focuses on truth as something written, not as something experienced'. He asks rhetorically whether slaves who sang of their hopes of walking 'all over God's heaven' were 'wrong to find comfort in such self-evident myth'.

Well, maybe they were, insofar as belief in otherworldly happiness has hindered efforts to improve or contest their earthly position. But I wouldn't call belief in Heaven and personal salvation a 'lie' or a 'fantasy', as I would beliefs that one human group is inherently superior to another, or that Aids is a manufactured tool of genocide. The ideas to which my book devotes hostile attention make claims about the world which can be demonstrated to be wrong, and in some cases damaging to the life-chances of those who are taught them.

White's two kinds of truth seem to me to be falsely counterposed; his notion that one is peculiar to the political philosopher, the other to the historian (for what it's worth, such academic qualifications as I have are in history) is also curious. People come to believe that certain things are true – though they may be mistaken – in part through their experience. For literate people, much of that experience is gained or mediated through writing. I have never visited Malawi. But I think it is probably true that there is a district there called Magomero, very much as described in a brilliant historical study I've read. Indeed, I suspect that the author of Magomero – Landeg White – would be rather disconcerted if I didn't find 'truth as something written' in it.

Stephen Howe
Ruskin College, Oxford

From Gerald Moore

Landeg White could have been a little more severe in his handling of Stephen Howe's diatribe against Afrocentrism. Cheikh Anta Diop may have started as a lone voice, but he lived to see a much wider consensus that Egyptian civilisation was African in nature as well as in location. Research has shown the growth of several advanced Neolithic cultures along the Nile Valley during the preceding millennia. Add the availability of gold, copper and good building stone in Nubia and Egypt and all the ingredients were present locally for the birth of such a civilisation. As to its priority, there is not much doubt. By 3100 BC Egypt was a united, literate kingdom with an overall system of flood-control, law and administration. This is several centuries before comparable developments in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley or China.

Add that Africa is now recognised as the birthplace, not only of the human species, but of Homo sapiens sapiens, and the Afrocentrists have quite a lot to boast about. Ironically, it was Charles Darwin, later dragged here and there by the apostles of racism, who was the first to suggest Africa as the cradle of us all.

Gerald Moore
Udine, Italy