Adventures in the Colored Museum: Afrocentrism, Memory, and the Construction of RaceAuthor(s): Gerald EarlySource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 703-711Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/682048Accessed: 30/08/2010 21:33

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GERALD EARLY Department of African and Afro-American Studies Washington University St. Louis, MO 63130

Adventures in the Colored Museum: Afrocentrism, Memory, and the Construction of Race

. . . that part of the great wealth of the Negro experience lay precisely in its double-edgedness.

James Baldwin, "Princes and Powers''

Part I

In the spring of 1994 when I was a visiting professor at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, Itaught J. D. Salinger's The Catcherin theRye in a course on the post-World War II American novel to a class of 12 black students. That novel opens with Holden Caulfield visiting his history professor, whose course he failed. His failure is based, in part, on the inadequate an- swer he gave to an essay question about the Egyptians. Caulfield wrote:

The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Afnca. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern hemisphere.

The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modem science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to moderTI science in the twentieth century.2

Several in the class took great umbrage at this description of Egyptians, notwithstanding its comic intent (Holden footnotes his answer by saying that this is all he knows about Egyptians and that they weren't interesting to him), or that its symbolic significance later in the novel when Holden visits the Natural History Museum was not related to race. They were particularly incensed that ancient Egyptians were described as Caucasians. "It ' s just another white novel telling lies," I was told. I reminded the stu- dents that few readers were known to have come to The Catcher in the Rye for a lesson in ancient history and that perhaps they were being overly sensitive, for the descrip- tion of the ancient Egyptians was not, after all, very impor- tant to the meaning of the novel. What the novel is, I suggested, with its symbol of Egyptian burial rites, is the riddle of human memory itself, which is why Holden, on his exam, singles out the face as incorruptible. The face is

the essence of not only what we remember but how we re- member. Why do we remember what we remember and how does the act of memory inform our humanity? Is iden- tity the construction and assertion of memory, the psycho- logical museum of the self that is so dependent on the idea of a collectivity, of a past derived from many? At the end of the novel, when Holden takes two boys down to see the Egyptian mummies in the Natural History Museum, he re- counts nearly word for word his exam answer about the Egyptians burying their dead. Then, he describes the de- scent itself:

To get to where the mummies were, you had to go down this very narrow sort of hall with stones on the side that they'd taken right out of this Pharaoh's tomb and all. It was pretty spooky, and you could tell the two hot-shots I was with weren't enjoying it too much. They stuck close as hell to me, and the one that didn't talk at all practically was holding onto my sleeve. "Let's go," he said to his brother. "I seen 'em awreddy. C'mon, hey." He turned around and beat it.

"He's got a yella streak amile wide," the otherone said, "So long! " He beat it, too.

I was the only one left in the tomb then.3

In this descent to the remnants of one of the earliest re- corded human civilizations, to one of the earliest sets of collective memories we have, a descent that becomes like Orpheus's descent into hell, Holden is left alone, suggest- ing that the construction of memory, at least for this 1 950s novel that was so obsessed with the solitary, is largely an individual act. Second, when Holden discovers the "Fuck You" message scrawled on the tomb, he realizes that there are no sacred spaces or that there can be no sacred without there simultaneously being a profane. All that is human is both horrible violation and holy transcendence. All mem- ory is both sacred and profane and in the very act of being memory is an act of violation and an act of conservation. I thought for my black students at Fisk this theme, in their Afrocentric mood, they would find compelling because it seemed so analogous, in vital ways, to the act of African American memory. It was a way of looking into and out- side of yourself at the same time by understanding the in- vasive power of memory as a form of humanity.

American Anthropologist 100(3):703-71 1. Copyright i) 1999, American Anthropological Association

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But my students responded by saying if the ancient Egyptians were Caucasians and Holden is Caucasian, then what he encounters at the end is a reflection of his own tribal history, his tribal self. They were further troubled that readers would accept such descriptions of ancient Egyptians because they were embedded in a highly re- garded novel and, like a "plant" or subliminal suggestion in an ad, have all the more deadly effect because, since the novel is not about ancient Egyptians, is focused on other matters, it would not be noticed or rebutted. It is hardly likely, though, that such a description would not be no- ticed today as the subject of races in antiquity has become vigorously debated in certain academic circles. I had thought these students would see Salinger's work as a "white" novel in the sense that they would feel that the novel was not written with them in mind as readers. All the stuff about prep school, upper-class white life, and white rebellion against conformity, this I figured they might find suff1ciently remote or, at least, off-putting to be useful to me as a teacher in helping them ultimately come to some new sense of themselves through the novel. The great ad- vantage, I thought, for black Americans reading white American literature, was that it was both a reflection of themselves and utterly not a reflection of themselves, and the tension of this double-mindedness was revelatory. I had not anticipated that the novel would be "marked," "ra- cialized," in this way, because of ancient Egyptians being called Caucasians.

My students further reminded me that Afrocentrism was meant to combat just the sort of subtle racism as the description of ancient Egyptians in The Catcher in the Rye. They finally dismissed Salinger' s novel as irrelevant. I told them I thought the book very relevant because it was about memory and so, for that matter, is Afrocentrism. "Afrocentrism, properly understood," I said, "teaches that race is about memory. Race is memory, and if you see the book as white 'tribalism,' that makes the point even more telling." But if race is memory what is it we wish to re- member through this construction of ourselves and why do we insist on remembering at what often appears to be a tremendous cost?

On the campus of Fisk University is a statue of W. E. B. Du Bois, the school's most famous student, a remarkable honor as schools rarely erect statues and monuments for former students. It is commonly known that in 1903, in his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois wrote this passage:

After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself irough the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, ffiis double-conscious- ness, this sense of always looking at one's self irough the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by ie tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity. One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being tom asunder.4

One way to understand Afrocentrism is to see it as an at- tempt to create a true black self-consciousness or to create for blacks a world in which they can see themselves through their own eyes or a way to reconcile the twoness of being both an American and a Negro, of being caught between two abstractions. Many years later, Du Bois wrote in his Autobiography about his coming to Fisk Uni- versity in 1885 and his Elrst sojourn in the south and among great numbers of other black folk:

A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro.5

In the earlier passage, he spoke of being unable to rec- oncile one state of consciousness with the other; in the later passage, he speaks of the two identities as if they were mutually exclusive, as they are in the first passage, and neither contingent on the other. The first passage rather suggests that, indeed, the two identities are contingent on each other: the problem is not that they are distinct but that they cannot be made distinct enough to be separated so that the black person can be free to be a Negro, solely and completely. For the Negro cannot remember himself or herself as a Negro without remembering himself or herself as an American or someone denied the opportunity to be one. Indeed, in the case of the first quotation, Du Bois ac- tually presents either being American and being Negro as impossible for the black person, both being negative capa- bilities, each marking what the other isn't and in some ways each foreclosing the other. The second quotation does not make any such suggestion that both are impossi- ble but rather that only one is possible. It is difficult to say exactly what Du Bois means, as the first passage is so richly complex, dense with meaning. But one thing is made clear in both passages: that African Americans are not uniquely but complexly double-edged people. And one thing is made clear in the first passage: the Negro and the Egyptian are two distinct races of people, two different

1 . James Baldwin, "Princes and Powers," in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage International, 1993), p. n. 2. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), p. 1 1 . 3. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 20>204. 4. W. E. B . Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1982), p. 45. 5. W. E. B . Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 108.

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groups in the history of the world. That I found interesting in re-reading my Du Bois while at Fisk during the time I was teaching The Catcher in the Rye.

It is, in this regard, perhaps, no small irony that the man many consider to be the father of Afrocentrism, Cheikh Anta Diop, should have had his dissertation on the African origins of Egypt and the Egyptian origins of European civilization rejected by his committee at the University of Paris in 1951, the year when The Catcher in the Rye was published.

Part II

"I asked: 'Where is the black man's Government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his Presi- dent, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs ? ' I could not find them, and then I de- clared, 'I will help to make them.' s6 This famous quota- tion from Marcus Garvey, great black nationalist leader of the post-World War I era, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and creator of a failed business enterprise called the Black Star Line (the name, of course, racializing Sir Samuel Cunard's world-renowned White Star Line) suggests, first, the preoccupation with race con- struction among blacks is not new, and, second, all mille- narian reformations are really regressive movements. It is striking how much Garvey's "great man" vision of race reformation sounds like the Edwardian vision of Arab ref- ormation and social change of T. E. Lawrence in the intro- ductory chapter of Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influ- ence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of ffieir national thoughts.7

Garvey lived in England between 1913 and 1914 and was familiar with Anglo ways even before, as he grew up in Jamaica. Thus, he was enamored of British imperialism and hoped one day that Africa might have the same type of empire. The similarity in vision between himself as re- storer of African greatness and Lawrence as restorer of Arab greatness is hardly surprising. Garvey was, of course a great man, or at least, one of the most signif1cant black men of the twentieth century. He has been the only West- ern black leader to have created a truly international or- ganization and the only one to have made a mass move-

ment built on the idea of black irredentism. Neither the Nation of Islam, nor the Moorish Americans, nor the Re- public of New Africa, nor the Congress of Afrikan Peo- ples, nor the Revolutionary Action Movement, all of which can claim some element of irredentism in their phi- losophy, can ever make the claim that they made this idea of black reclamation and restoration a mass movement or a movement popular with ordinary people. Garvey can be- cause he did. I think the British influence of empire inten- siEled this sense of irredentism that made his movement so remarkable.

Moreover, in examining the British sources of Garvey's influence, we recognize that Garvey was enormously af- fected while in England by Duse Mohammed Ali, the son of a Sudanese mother and an Egyptian father, who, after a career in theater, became a journalist, eventually founding his own nationalist-oriented paper, the African Times and Orient Review, for which Garvey worked for a time. In 191 1, Duse Mohammed Ali published In the Land of the Pharaohs, a highly successful, highly plagiarized, nation- alist history of Egypt that had an enormous impact on black intellectuals everywhere, intensifying their sense of Ethiopianism or the idea that the reconstruction of the race was connected with the redemption of Africa, and particularly with a connection of ancient Egypt to the Great Negro Past.8

But the history of this goes back further. David Walker, a black Boston clothes dealer, wrote in his militant mani- festo, David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles to the Col- ored Citizens of the World (1830), a passionate, uncom- promising answer to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and its despairing, racist view of blacks, claiming them inferior in every way to whites except one, as Houston Baker pointed out in a brilliant lecture. They were equal to whites in memoiy. And it was Jefferson's great fear that this would cause race war as the blacks would remember the horror of their enslavement and seek revenge. Walker, too, thought about memory as a source for revenge or at least for revolutionary resistance on the part of blacks, but he also thought about memory in rela- tion to the construction of race consciousness, through the construction of race itself, through the expropriation of ancient Egypt as the black man ' s civilization:

I would only mention that the Egyptians were Africans or col- ored people, such as we are some of them yellow and others dark a mixture of Ethiopians and natives of Egypt about the same as you see the colored people of the United States at the present day.... 9

6. Quoted in Edmund David Cronon, Black Mvses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 16.

7. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), pp. 2s25. 8. For the information on Duse Muhammad Ali, I am indebted to Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers,

Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 519-521 . 9. David Walker, Walker'sAppeal to the Colored Citizens of the Wor/d (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 18.

706 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 100, NO. 3 * SEPTEMBER 1998

And, later:

When we take a retrospective view of the arts and sci- ences the wise legislators-The Pyramids, and other mag- nificent buildings the turning of the channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece....10

Lydia Maria Child, a white abolitionist, home econo- mist, and children's writer, in her seminal but neglected An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans (1836) (the irony of the title alone seems suffi- ciently damning of American hypocrisy in racial matters; why is there a class of Americans called something other than Americans?) also wrote in this vein:

Some ancient writers suppose ffiat Egypt derived all the arts and sciences from Ethiopia; while offiers believe precisely the reverse....

It is well known that Egypt was the great school of knowl- edge in the ancient world. It was the birth-place of Astron- omy; and we still mark the constellations as they were ar- ranged by Egyptian shepherds.... A large portion of Grecian mythology was thence derived....

Herodotus, the earliest of the Greek historians, informs us that the Egyptians were negroes. This fact has been much doubted, and often contradicted. But Herodotus certainly had the best means of knowing the tiuth on this subject; for he traveled in Egypt....

The statues of the Sphinx have the usual characteristics of the negro race.' l

Nearly ageneration later, in 1854,the greatblackleader Frederick Douglass weighed in on the subject in his fa- mous address, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered":

while it may not be claimed that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes- viz: answering, in all respects, to the nations and tribes ranged under the general appellation, Negro; still, it may safely be affirmed, that a strong affinity and a direct rela- tionship may be claimed by ffie Negro race, to ffiat greatest of all nations of antiquity, the builders of the pyramids. [empha- sis in original]'2

The metaphor is overwhelmingly appealing: if black Americans are related by blood (race as biology, com- monly believed in the nineteenth century) and by geogra- phy (race as culture and proximity, commonly believed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) to those grand builders of civilization, the ancient Egyptians, why cannot they build or rebuild, literally construct themselves as a

race? The construction was all about the careful appro- priation of memory, of a past. This idea came into its own after World War II.

Several years ago, I was in a hotel room in New York with a colleague, interviewing a decidedly supercilious West Indian who seemed nearly as intent on interviewing us, although we hadn ' t applied for a job in African Ameri- can literature:

"The white man wants to have his cake and eat it, too," he said at one point, "He wants to call the ancient Egyp- tians 'mixed race.' He says this as if this means that they are not black. Yet, according to his own 'one-drop ' rule, if the Egyptians were mixed race people, if they were some kind of mulatto race, then they were black, pure and sim- ple. Black, nothing but black. The white man cannot say that the Egyptians were not white and then say they were not black either. The Egyptians were black, African black, and that settles the matter. This may not interest you, Pro- fessor Early, but it is of vital importance."'3

Perhaps my face betrayed the boredom I felt. I must ad- mit that, like James Baldwin when he Elrst heard that an- cient Egypt was part of the Great Negro Past (a concept, an idea, this Great Negro Past, that has haunted me since my boyhood as there were at least a few black people around who espoused it, preached it, taught it), from the most learned and arguably greatest popularizer of the idea, Cheikh Anta Diop, at the 1956 Conference of Negro-Afri- can Writers and Artists in Paris, this thesis did not interest me greatly. That is to say, it was not an idea that had be- come an article of faith for me or the article of a political creed. But this conference, coming as it did one year after the Afro-Asian Unity conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which explicitly brought together the leaders of"colored" nations, peoples who had been subjected to or were still under the thumb of European colonialism, was the con- tinuation of the articulation of a certain anger and the quest for a usable past for the colonized, a new racial memory. And it was this growing sense of common cause with non- white peoples around the world that intensified the obses- sion for unity, for race construction, for blacks or people of African descent. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1940, some 15 years before the Bandung conference:

But one thing is sure and that is the fact that since the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory. The actual ties of heritage between

10. David Walker, Walker'sAppeal, pp. 29-30 I 1. Lydia MariaChild,AnAppeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (New York: Arno Press, 1968), pp. 149-150. 12. Frederick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Effinologically Considered," address delivered at Westem Reserve College, July 12, 1854, in Phillip Foner, ed.,

The Life and Writings of FrederickDouglass, Volume 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 301 . 13. The applicant probably got his version of the idea that ancient Egyptians are black from Chancellor Williams: "From their all-powerful 'position of strength'

[whites] continue to arrange and rearrange the world as it please them, naming and classifying people, places and things as they will. In the United States, whites known to have any amount of 'Negro blood,' no matter how small, are classified as Negroes; in Africa, North Africa in particular, they do the very opposite. Blacks with any amount of 'Caucasian blood' are classified as ' white. ' This scheme was rigorously applied in the history of Egypt...." Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Greatlssues of a Racefrom 4500B.C. to 2000A.D. (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987), p. 37.

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the individuals of this group, vary with the ancestors that they have in common and many others.... But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa. [emphasis added]'4

In his famous lengthy essay on the Negro-African writ- ers' conference in Paris, "Princes and Powers," published in Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin describes briefly the lecture he heard by Diop:

The evenlng session began with a film, which I missed, and was followed by a speech from Cheik [sic] Anta Diop, which, in sum, claimed the ancient Egyptian empire as part of the Ne- gro past. I can only say that this question has never greatly ex- ercised my mind, nor did M. Diop succeed in doing so-at least not in the direction he intended. He quite refused to re- main within the twenty-minute limit and, while his claims of the deliberate dishonesty of all Egyptian scholars may be quite well-founded for all I know, I cannot say that he con- vinced me. He was, however, a great success in the hall, sec- ond only, in fact, to Aime Cesaire.'5

The fact that Baldwin was not impressed by Diop's claims is not surprising, considering Baldwin' s temperament and inclination at the time the essay was written. It was Bald- win who wrote a year earlier in the autobiographical pref- ace to his essay collection, Notes of a Native Son:

when I followed the line of my past I did not filnd myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain for ever for any reflection of my- self. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these wh ite centuries, I would have to make them mine I would have to accept my special atti- tude, my special place in this schemetherwise I would have no place in any scheme. [emphasis in original] 16

For a man who thinks in this way, the rediscovery of an- cient Egypt as a black civilization, the reconstruction of an African past, the memory of a Great Negro Past, is of little consequence. Baldwin was committed to the conceits of

his own ambiguities and, to him, the near-absurd ambiva- lence inherent in being an American black. Moreover, Baldwin was a bit chary because of Richard Wright's in- volvement with this conference. (Wright delivered a pa- per that can be found in his book, White Man, Listen.)l7 Wright had been involved with the creation of Presence Africaine, the publication that helped put the conference together, since its inception in 1947 and had written a book, Black Power, on Ghana and Nkrumah in 1954. Wright was, on the whole, a great deal more interested in African affairs than Baldwin was oreverwould be. Gener- ally, Baldwin did not trust politics or evidence much inter- est in political affairs. He found people who were deeply passionate about politics to be boring. Wright, being a for- mer Marxist, was fascinated by politics because he was fascinated by the various facets of power as human ex- pression. Although Wright's view of Africa was decid- edly ambivalent, the fact that Baldwin wanted very much to be a distinct entity from him may have influenced his view of this conference. Wright also was responsible for the much-maligned and suspected, official American delegation that included Horace Mann Bond, James Ivy, and Mercer Cook, being present at the conference at all. There was, throughout the conference, considerable hos- tility toward the black Americans from their African hosts and lecturers, not the least of whom so disposed was Diop. As Robert July writes inAnAfrican Voice: TheRole of the Humanities in African lndependence ( 1 987):

To the Senegalese historian, Cheikh Anta Diop, Marxist and staunch adherent of Negritude, the United States delegates were faithful representatives of the society that had produced them. They fully supported the so-called American way and they were firmly anti-Communist. While they were whole- heartedly behind the aspirations of Africans for freedom from colonialism . . . they regarded modernization through high technology as the most effective means for African social and economic advancement. Isheir support of Amencan society was a form of self-support, for they were firmly committed to achieving equal status for blacks in America. ' 8

But Baldwin, in part because he was a writer and not an American Negro leader, did not consider himself one of these. He was an American of a different sort, different from Wright, different from the other black Americans present. He was the black American who was much aware of the double-edged nature of his perspective, of his own keen individuality. Doubtless, Baldwin thought Diop's

1 4. W. E. B . Du Bois, "The Concept of Race," in Eric Sundquist, ed., The Oxf ord W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 87. Du Bois was to develop this idea of "Third Worldism" or a "colored" world when he made explicit connections between colonialism and slums in Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), see specifically chapters 2, 3, and 4.

I 5. James Baldwin, "Princes and Powers," in Nobody KnowsMyName, p. 43. 16. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. S7. 17. Richard Wright, "Tradition and Industrialization," in White Man, Listen (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), pp. 44 68. Wright felt that what he had to say was

very much out of synch with much of what was being said at the conference or at least what was most popularly received at the conference, such as Aime Cesaire's militant, nationalistic lecture. See Robert July, An African Voice: The Role of the Humanities in African Independence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 2g28.

1 8. Robert July, AnAfrican Voice: The Role of the Humanities inAfrican Independence, p. 38.

19. Quoted in Anderson Thompson's foreword in Chancellor Williams, The Rebirth of African Civilization (Chicago: The Third World Press, 1993), p. iv. This forewordprovides a good account of Williams'scareer. Williams studiedunderLeo Hansberry at Howard, the fatherofAfrican Studies in the United States.

20. For a full account of Diop's career, see Ivan Van Sertima, ed., GreatAfrican Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1992), pp. 7-16, a book that provides a number of articles, in excessive praise, of Diop's work. For a more objective assessment of Diop, see Robert July, An African Voice, pp. 137-140 and passim.

21. For more about Egypt's strong identiElcation with black Africa at the time the 1 950s and early 1 960s under Nasser, see Louis Lomax, The ReluctantAfrican (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960).

708 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 100, NO. 3 SEPTEMBER 1 998

presentation overly long and probably fairly pedantic, pe- destrian, and schoolmarm-ish on the one hand, anxious and irrelevant on the other. The fact that Diop was enthusi- astically received by the other African and African Ameri- can intellectuals and writers present at the conference in- dicates how compelling a hold this thesis had on the minds of most black thinkers, on the minds of the black interna- tional elite, at least a generation or more before Afrocen- trism became popular.

Most Afrocentric scholars at universities today genu- flect at the intellectual altar of Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese intellectual (both humanist and scientist), born in an Islamic Senegalese village in l 923, and who be- gan his research into African history in l 946, as the battle against European colonialism in Africa was beginning. This was one year after the Fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England, attended by Kwame Nkrumah, to be the first president of Ghana, and Jomo Kenyatta, to be a revolutionary Mau-Mau in Kenya and eventually that country's first black president as well. Chancellor Williams attended this conference and it obvi- ously had a big effect on his thinking. He said, "we arrived with the idea that Africa needs westernization, we left be- lieving nothing could be worse than complete western- ization...."19 Diop, not to be confused with Alioune Diop, the editor of Presence AJi icaine, the leading post- World War magazine of African affairs or David Diop, Negri- tude poet, or Birago Diop, Senegalese poet and folklorist, all contemporaries but unrelated, saw his mission as un- dermining European colonialism by destroying the Euro- peans' claim to a superior history, to, in fact, a "real" his- tory that was the mark of Europeans being the product of a civilization and not of the jungle. To make a claim of his- tory was, in fact, a sign of being an equal player in the fam- ily of man, for it was to make a claim to a powerful, eso- teric, but essential set of particular but transcendent memories. For Diop, the construction of memory was the construction of race . Further, for Diop, it was not only nec- essary to reconstruct African history, it was also necessary to demonstrate a unified Africa, especially important ideologically for a Pan African movement that African in- tellectuals felt was a necessity, whether myth or fact, to overthrow European imperialism. Like every other op- pressed group, Africans could only face the future if they could hearken back to some version of their past and if that future, in some ways, guaranteed the reinvention of a past that most deElned the tradition that made them great. Euro- pean intervention denied the Afiicans the ability to deter-

mine for themselves the worth of their memory. That this reconstruction could be done only through running Afri- can history and African civilization through Egypt, the only African civilization that impressed and that was widely known by European intellectuals, is interesting. Ancient Egypt is the only African civilization, as Stanley Crouch suggested, that has monuments, the sort of re- mains that indicate history as understood in European terms. In order to get respect for their humanity by having a distinct set of memories, the Africans had to couch their setting of remembrance in terms that Europeans could un- derstand, could, in fact, be in awe of. Thus, for black peo- ple in Africa to be unified and humanized, for black people around the world to feel unified and humanized, ancient Egypt had to be a "black" civilization and serve as the ori- gin of all blackness and, even more importantly, all white- ness, as it were. The paradox that the Africans' memory was not free but contingent upon what Europeans thought of it is obvious and perhaps the biggest weakness of Afro- centrism, which, in the end, does not challenge Eurocen- trism but simply absorbs its values and reverses them.

After the initial rejection of his dissertation in 195 1, the story goes that Diop was only able to defend his disserta- tion successfully in 1960 when he was accompanied into the examination room by an arrny of historians, sociolo- gists, and anthropologists who supported his views or at least his right as a responsible scholar to express them.20 By 1960, with African independence in full swing, his ideas had a political currency in Africa itself where Pan Africanism, a kind of ur-version of Afrocentrism, was in full flower. And no one supported the idea of unified Af- rica more than then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, probably the most powerful independent leader on the continent, who called himself, like Gandhi, a black man, and fancied an Africa united in opposition to Israel and South Africa. It was a good moment for Diop to be saying what he was saying.2'

Diop produced a number of volumes translated into English, some based on his dissertation, among them: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, Civiliza- tion or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, and The Cultural Unity of BlackAfrica. For Diop, the crucial mat- ter in constructing a coherent African history was estab- lishing that ancient Egypt was a black civilization. As Diop wrote, "The history of Black Africa will remain sus- pended in air and cannot be written correctly unti} African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt."22 Diop brings together three important elements in under-

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standing the origins of Afrocentrism or in understanding the politicization of the formation of African American memory as the self-conscious construction of race. First, Diop validated the tradition of embattled, professional, politically motivated historical research meant to buttress the claims of the untrained but dedicated and obsessive amateur historian who works to create a popular history with academic apparatus; only the amateur can create in- novations in knowledge because he or she is not bound to protect the set of assumptions that has given the profes- sional his or her legitimacy; this is, in effect7 an attack against the process of intellectual legitimation, Martin Bernal ' s motive for his massive BlackAthena, a book that was modeled after Diop's work and built on Diop's ex- plicitly political mission.23 Second, Diop established the explicit connection between correct knowledge of one's proper history and one ' s psychological and spiritual well- being, the therapeutic use of memory and self-conscious- ness. And third, Diop reinforced the connection between proper knowledge of one's history and the realization of a political mission and purpose, the sacred and politicized use of memory. Diop's research supports the idea of a white conspiracy of history to discredit or ignore black civilization, advocates the need for proper knowledge of an African past in order to unify blacks beyond simply the idea that they share a common oppression, and suggests that blacks are, without proper knowledge of their ancient past or proper interest in it, both politically impotent and mentally ill. (The emergence of this idea of race construc- tion has led to the ever-growing significance of Afrocen- tric psychologists like Na'im Akbar, Frances Cress Welsing [a psychiatrist], Wade Nobles, Asa Hilliard, and others and to the ideals of a perfected black psychology from the destruction of whiteness.) These ideas have be- come the dogma for the construction of a black race. When Diop died in 1986, he had been virtually canonized by an important set of black American scholars who identified themselves as Afrocentrists.

Part III

I recently taught several chapters of Martin Bernal's Black Athena to an introductory African American Stud-

ies class. I was not very surprised that the students were impressed with the book, not merely because it said that ancient Egypt was a black civilization, which to many of them was probably a matter of indifference, but more with the idea that the historiography of the ancient world had been a kind of white conspiracy, with classicists, archae- ologists, and historians having fabricated Greece as the seat of Western civilization. Greece was, according to Bernal, nothing more, really, than a Egyptian colony, but whites, in order to construct their own memory of ances- tral whiteness, erased ancient Egypt, first by erasing its blackness, then by erasing its influence on Greece. When I asked the students if they were disturbed by Bernal's last sentence in his introduction-"The political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural ar- rogance"24-they said they were not. When I asked if they were disturbed by the fact that Bernal was attacking the field of classical studies as being implicitly and explicitly racist and, thus, implicitly and explicitly political (which, I supposed, justifies his own explicit politics), but he him- self had not been trained as either a historian, an archae- ologist, or a classical linguist, they expressed no concern. Finally, I asked, after they had read some critiques of Ber- nal ' s work, if they could, on their own, see flaws in his rea- soning, and they said no. Indeed, they did not generally find the critiques of Bernal ' s work to be convincing.

I then entered class one day and told the class that I had been so inspired by Bernal's book that I decided to write one of my own, based on Bernal's model. I said that my book would be a defense of slavery as the proper social system to protect the weak and less capable. I told them that I would call my book The Humane Legree, modeled after Bernal's Black Athena. Just as he reasoned that Athena was truly a black Egyptian figure, not a Greek one, so I reason that Simon Legree as the prototypical slave owner was not evil as the liberal egalitarians have slurred and distorted him, but good and benevolent. My book, like Bernal's, would be in three parts: the first part would be called the Pagan Model, in which I would argue that the ancient world had it right in their social and political rela- tions when they had slavery and that all the records from the ancient world that I have found support the institution of slavery, just as the all the records from the ancient world

22. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Afyth or Reality (edited and translated by Mercer Cook). (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974), p. xiv. Diop further writes in this preface: "In a word, we must restore the historical consciousness of the African peoples and re-conquer a Promethean consciousness" p. xv.

23. It is interesting to note how much, in this regard, Bernal politicizes the writing of black history: "A very small number of black academics, notably, Frank Snowden, the leading professor in the field at the chief black university, Howard, have been successful with Classics. They have concentrated on gleaning what little credit the Aryan model allows to Blacks while accepting both its prohibitions: the non-acceptance of a Black component of Egyptian culture, and the denial of the Afroasiatic formative elements in Greek civilization. Other Scholars, more keenly aware of the degree to which racism has pervaded every nook and cranny of 1 9th- and 20th-century European and North American culture, have been more sensitive. " Bernal goes on to describe black scholar Jacob Carruthers' s highly politicized divisions of black historical scholarship into three camps: "the old scrappers," untrained black historians like George G. M. James, and, I suppose, someone like J . A. Rodgers. The middle group includes the most famous trained black historians like John Hope Franklin, W. E. B . Du Bois, and Ali Mazrui, and the last group, the most revered, is Diop, Ben Jochannan, and Chancellor Williams. Bernal makes no mention of Carter G. Woodson, nor does he indicate if Carruthers does, a serious omission. In any case, Bernal sees his work as "an attempt to reconcile" certain hostile camps, although it seems clear from his account that he is very partial to "the old scrappers" and to the school of Afrocentrist thought of someone like Diop, and much less impressed by Snowden. See Bernal, BlackAthena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 434-437.

24. Martin Bernal, BlackAthena: TheAfroasiaticRoots of Classical Civilization, Volume I, p. 73.

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that Bernal found supported the theory of Greece having been culturally spawned by Egypt. I would then discuss the rise of the Liberal-Egalitarian Model, which rose with the Enlightenment and spread its warped ideas all over the world that slavery was wrong, morally and politically. I would argue that all intellectuals and scholars today are part of the Liberal-Egalitarian conspiracy to slur slavery, to hide its good points, to distort its benevolence, to keep the truth from us about what it was, just as Bernal argued about the modern classical studies fabricating Greece in the creation of the Aryan Model. I would argue that Lib- eral-Egalitarianism fabricated freedom and democracy. Finally, I would argue for a Revised Pagan Model, just as Bernal argued for a Revised Ancient Model, in which I would advocate a return to the Pagan Model of slavery, understanding, of course, that we would no longer have any sort of race-based slavery or slavery based on violence but a slavery based on ability and merit. Some people needed to have their lives controlled completely by others because they lacked ability or emotional stability. The Liberal-Egalitarian Model needed to be overthrown, just as Bernal believed that the Aryan Model of the fabrication of Greece needed to be overthrown. This parody of Ber- nal ' s argument that I created, in part, to reveal to them the structural problem in Bernal's position, that a good many bad things could be argued and argued very persuasively from his overly simplistic syllogism, had a curious effect on the class. Many, at first, tried to argue against slavery, but found that they actually could not. Slavery had existed for far longer in the world than freedom and I had the weight of this on my side, just as Bernal had on his side that the ancients said certain things about Greece and Egypt that he felt had greater validity than what people said later. Once they found that they couldn't argue against the argu- ment that slavery was humane, they were forced to con- front Bernal ' s thesis through my parody of it. It made them feel a bit uncomfortable and on the whole I don't think they liked it. "We trusted Bernal because you assigned him to us," one student said. I think many felt what I had done was clever but somehow not right, that I had betrayed them by exposing Bernal in this way. It was a lesson, as was Bernal's book, in the politics of memory and a cau- tionary tale that how we might decide to use memory po- litically might be turned and used against us in the valida- tion of another kind of politics through the same evocation of memory.

"Many ofthe peoples," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois inBlack Folk Then and Now, ';and much of the culture of ancient

Egypt originated in Equatorial Africa."25 Black Folk Then and Now was published in June 1939, an expanded version of much earlier book by Du Bois called The Negro that appeared in 1915. It is not likely that Du Bois's state- ment about the origins of ancient Egyptian culture caused much of a stir in 1939 among the relatively small number of persons who read the book. (Advance sales were 650 copies, not bad for an academic book, especially one as challenging to read as this, and there was always interest among a certain group of people for this kind of book, par- ticularly those in the black community called "race" men and "race" women who want to get the historical truth about African experience and who have a fairly nationalist bent. I ran across a copy of BlackFolk Then and Now in a black barbershop when I was a boy and promptly depos- ited it in a pile that included Awake, The Watch Tower, Muhammad Speaks} 100 Years of Negro Lynching, 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, 50 Card Tricks to Amaze Your Friends, Ebony, Sepia, Jet, Tan, and other such esoteria. One could always f1nd a fair number of "race" men in the average black barbershop of the 1950s and 1960s. But Du Bois'.s book, like CarterG. Woodson's The Mis-Education of theNegro and Outline of NegroHistory, could be found in the homes and businesses of more com- mon black folk than one might imagine.) Interest along the lines of self-conscious race construction connected to the African past was not at all unusual for Du Bois. He organ- ized four Pan African conferences: 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927. He attended the first Pan-African conference, or- ganized by Henry Sylvester Williams, in 1900. He con- vened an April 1945 conference at New York's Public Li- brary's Schomburg Collection that included Nkrumah, Bhola D. Panth of India, and Msung Saw Tun of B urma, as well as Rayford Logan, Lawrence Reddick, and others.26 George Padmore, good friend of Richard Wright, con- vened the Pan African Conference held in Manchester, England that same year. According to Padmore in his Pan- Africanism or Communism:

In our struggle for national freedom, human dignity and social redemption Pan-Afncanism offers an ideological alternative to Communism on one side and Tribalism on the other. It re- jects both white racialism and black chauvinism. It stands for racial co-existence on the basis of absolute equality and re- spect forhuman personality.27

But it would seem here that Padmore may have con- fused Pan Africanism' s aims with its tactics, its goals with its obsessions. Understandably, Pan Africanism could not

25. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thompson Organization Limited, 1987), p. 14. Du Bois continues by arguing for the unity of Kush and ancient Egypt, "[Semitic] writers merged Kush and Egypt as forming essentially one people" (p. 1 69to further the claim of the blackness of Egypt as Kush was unquestionably a black African civilization. Black Folk Then and Now is a book that Bernal particularly admires.

26. See W. E. B. Du Bois, TheAutobiographyof W. E. B. DuBois foraccounts of Du Bois's involvement in various Pan Aflican conferences. 27. Quoted in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Aatobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 399. In Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement,

1 869-191 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), Owen Charles Mathurin takes issues with some claims Du Bois made about how central he was in the development of the Pan-African movement.

28. J.D.Salinger, TheCatcherintheRyey pp. 121-122.

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really shake off a virulent kind of black chauvinism, but more importantly it could not shake off the ideology of ra- cialism itself as whites had constructed it. Du Bois's book appeared two years before white anthropologist Melville Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past, which argued that blacks in the New World still retained significant cul- tural features of an African past that was far from barba- rous or inferior to a European past. The connection is im- portant because Du Bois said he was inspired to write about the glories of the Negro past after having heard at Atlanta University in 1906 white anthropologist Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, as he is called, mentor of Zora Neale Hurston, debunker of racism, and defender of the riches of the African past. Hurston herself, the first trained black anthropologist to write extensively on the subject of race using her academic training (she also wrote novels), was, too, interested in the construction of race through memory, particularly around the speech-act as a communal signifier and a cultural preservative. What indeed interested Hurston as much was the idea of race as a kind of commodity or set of intricate commodities. But what is most important here is the influence of anthropol- ogy on two important black thinkers, Du Bois and Hur- ston, in their thinking about the construction of race through memory.

So, we return to Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and the Museum of Natural History, the work of anthropolo- gists and archaeologists. In the middle of the novel, Holden Caulfield writes:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything al- ways stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers [sic] would still be drink- ing out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and the squaw with the naked bosom

would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be differ- ent. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anyffiing. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat on this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new part- ner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you 'd heard your mother and fatherhav- ing a terriElc fight in the bathroom. Or you ' d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be diJ5erent in some way.... [emphasis in origi- nal]28

Does the past stand before us as exhibits in a museum and we, as children in a class, holding hands, hoping not to get lost or to lose our belongings, go through with one sort of guide or another, burdened by whatever accidental mood has come upon us? Is the past itself an accident or is our reconstruction of it as whimsical as childhood? Can we look at the past with something more than indifference and less than a regressive instinct? Perhaps the past stands before us as a kind of dumb show, never changing, the same cast with the same gestures, the same entries and exits. Perhaps it is we who change, change our perspective, our interpretation of the evidence of the show, in the never- ending need to reconstruct ourselves out of the remains of our ancestors, ourselves in another guise, so that they are both like us and unlike us. Perhaps the story of black folk, ancient Egypt, and the construction of blackness has its universal application in just this way: it's everybody's story of being in the museum, trying to figure out how to make it all work for you by looking in and looking out. And perhaps blacks exist on such an exquisite margin of American life there is something to be said about their double-edgedness, of their particular looking in and look- ing out.