Mary Lefkowitz’s book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History is Lefkowitz’s defense of the teaching profession against people who view the opportunity to teach a college class as a chance to inculcate the next generation with one’s own political views. Lefkowitz originally ran into Afrocentrism in the early 1990s when she found that actual scholars were teaching and writing that the civilization of the ancient Greeks had come wholesale across the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, as well as that people in ancient Egypt like Cleopatra were black – in addition to Socrates and other important people from classical antiquity. Their claim was that Africans had come across to Greece during the second millennium BC, laying the foundation for the mystic elements in Greek religion and setting up the philosophical basis of Aristotle and Plato. They used such “facts” as the claim that Aristotle had made off with many of the central works in the famed library at Alexandria; this fact crumbles in the presence of the reality that this library was created by people from Macedonian Greece several decades after Aristotle had passed away.
There are plenty of other theories that do not make it to such a prominent place in college curricula. After all, there are many people who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing President Kennedy, but that belief has not become the philosophical foundation for an entire realm of instruction at the university level. However, the reason why Lefkowitz felt it necessary to take on Afrocentrism was the wide distribution that was being accorded to the writings of these thinkers. Not only were some public school districts teaching Afrocentrism, but there were some university campuses that were adopting it as well. As a professor at Wellesley, Lefkowitz had had chances to engage Afrocentric thinkers who came to campus, but her attempts had been rejected, and even many of her own colleagues would not help her confront Afrocentrism. Their initial excuse was that history is difficult to nail down with precision because of the different perspectives that go into it. This means that, for her colleagues, Afrocentrism was just as possible an answer as the explanation that the classicists give for the rise of the Greeks. Another motive that Lefkowitz believes was at the root of her colleagues’ reticence was a desire to avoid the label of racism.
In Lefkowitz’s view, Afrocentrism is a cult of the mind, whose adherents refuse any influence from other sources of information. The Afrocentrists do not evaluate their own claims for veracity but instead focus on the chance to make African Americans feel better about themselves. She finds this to be an honorable motive, in its own way, but she also believes that the writing of historical scholarship does not have as its purpose the emotional well-being of a particular group of people. Instead, she feels that history should be an objective field. It is worth pointing out, though, that it can be immensely difficult to separate one’s feelings from one’s portrayal of history. Those biases have a way of working their way in quite innocuously, and even people who feel that they are quite evenhanded in their perceptions of history end up showing biases in their narration. Even recognizing that, though, Lefkowitz felt that it was necessary to fight against the Afrocentrist desire to turn history classes into feel-good sessions for those who need it.
It is worth pointing out what Lefkowitz exactly means with the term “Afrocentrism.” She credits the term to Molefi Asante, who used the term to refer to a world view that looks at things from the African perspective, rather than a European one. The term has become somewhat eponymous since then. It can refer to the totally healthy viewpoint that there are many elements of world culture that are the result of Africans and people whose ancestors were Africans although Western historians have largely overlooked their contributions, and it can also refer to the position that everything that is good originated in Africa. Lefkowitz does not like any position on the spectrum, though. She takes the assimilationists (DuBois and Douglass) to task for their position that African Americans and the ancient Egyptians share a heritage, but most of her irritation is saved for those who focus on Egypt and the Nile Valley as the center of everything good that has come from Africa.
It is also worth pointing out that the Afrocentrists are beginning at a point of dispossession, at least in their own minds. Their notion that they face a hostile audience is well documented and, on the basis of the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City with regard to the experiences that African Americans have all too often when they encounter white law enforcement officers, not entirely without justification. However, it is their position that they possess an absolute sort of truth that sends them toward the brink of academic invalidity. The Afrocentrists have not managed to conduct much research of any significance in terms of going back into the aboriginal languages, funding for books and other resources, and the sort of third-party reviewing that makes for legitimate academic publications. This objection is a legitimate one; however, some of the mistakes that Lefkowitz makes in her book are less forgivable, given her access to all of the academic tools that she needs.
Consider her claim that Pelos founded Argos (p. 13). Instead, in the Mediterranean he focused on Pisa and Elis, rather than the Argolid. She claims that the deciphering of hieroglyphics took place in 1836 (p. 35), when that accomplishment is generally considered to have happened about 15 years earlier. She supports the theory that melting snow was the cause of the Nile flood (p. 77). However, the Greeks posited that rains in Ethiopia were the cause. While these errors are somewhat minor, the fact is that as harsh as Lefkowitz is toward the Afrocentrists, these are matters of detail that some solid research would have cleared up. The claim that is most problematic is her suggestion that Afrocentrists are in some way opposed to freedom because they do not give the democratic structure in ancient Greece its proper due. However, the precedent of ancient Greece is much more problematic than she suggests. For example, Southern writers before the Civil War used the precedent of the Athenians to justify slavery (Richard). Also, the brief period in England when Oliver Cromwell and the other Roundheads ruled England based its philosophical foundation on Saxon myths and those elements of the Bible that criticized monarchy as an institution.
Moving back to her claim that Greece’s antecedents have little or nothing to do with Egypt, she is eschewing waters that other classicists have been willing to enter. Many of her colleagues in the classics are willing to accept that the ancient Greeks pulled some of their notions from Egypt. She casts doubt on the notion that Plato visited Egypt. However, there is documentation of this visit dates back to Plato’s nephew (Barnes). Finally, Lefkowitz takes aim at the claim that many classicists when she refutes Heracles’ Egyptian antecedents. Her claim is that Herodotus refers to a man named “Aegyptus” rather than “Aigyptos” (Lefkowitz, p. 25). However, her notion here flies in the face of all other classical scholarship, and she bases her claim on the supposition that everyone else has improperly translated apo, a preposition that, she says, can only be translated “descent from” in this particular context. She refers to the fact that Herodotus would have used the preposition ek if he had been referring to the country (Bernal). However, there are several reasons supporting the “erroneous” translation. First, this supposed “Aegyptos,” the twin of Danaos, was of Egyptian descent. Second, no other researcher has shown any concern with the use of apo to refer to location, because there are many other instances in which Herodotus uses apo in that way (Herodotus). Finally, there are no mythological researchers that connect any of Aegyptus’ descendants with the parents of Heracles (Apollodoros).
But what is to be made of the central focus of Lefkowitz’s irritation – the claim that the Greeks made off with the Egyptian religion, not to mention their ideas about science and philosophy? One central document is the Hermetic Corpus, a group of dialogues that were floating around Egypt as early as the first century BC (Bernal). These dialogues focused on Hermes Trismegistos, a sort of guru. This text was written in Greek and features neo-Platonic and Platonic ideas, although it features Egyptian characters. However, Lefkowitz claims that this text is a forgery; while the texts are Greeks, the authors claim to be Egyptian in order to build their own prestige. However, in the 1970s, some Coptic texts were found in 1945 in Upper Egypt and were published in the 1970s. There are enough parallels between these works and the Hermetic Corpus to establish a closer relationship between these ideas and Egyptian thought; in fact, scholarship has continued to look at ways that Gnosticism may well have come from Egyptian. The fact that Hermes has an equivalent in the Egyptian pantheon (Thoth, god of wisdom) and the moniker Hermes Trismegistos has an Egyptian analog: “Thoth Thrice Great” (Bernal) is just one problem; another is that Lefkowitz overlooks arguments from the eminent Egyptologist Sir Williams Flinders Petrie that there are some parts of the Hermetic work that have Persian antecedents, an argument that lays the foundation for some Egyptian sources in Plato’s thinking.
It is true that the Afrocentrist way of thinking has a number of issues from an academic point of view. However, those who are in the Eurocentric, conservative think tank are, in their own way, just as limited as the Afrocentrists. Unfortunately, Lefkowitz ultimately lacks the intellectual self-awareness to acknowledge the limits of her own point of view, and her book suffers as a result.
Works Cited
Bernal, Martin. Review of Mary Lefkowitz’ Not Out of Africa.
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/96.04.05.html
Lefkowitz, Mary. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as
History. New York: New Republic and Basic Books, 1996.
Richard, Carl J. The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
