The following is based on “Reply to a Critic”, chapter 12 of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):
In this chapter Diop replies to a critic of his book “Nations negres et culture” (1954), from which come the first ten chapters of this book.
The critic is Raymond Mauny, a French historian who taught at the Sorbonne and had a particular interest in West Africa. He has been to Senegal and seen and studied some of the very same things as Diop.
Diop says that it seems that Mauny did not read the whole book, since he asks questions that the book itself gives answers to. Further, Mauny talks about things that Diop said not in the book but in an interview, where one speaks less carefully.
That aside, Mauny asks why was black Africa backwards for so long if it got its civilization from Egypt? To which Diop counters, why was Western Europe backwards for so long if it got its civilization from Rome? Or, indeed, why did Egypt itself become backwards if it got its civilization from Egypt?
Mauny questions whether the drawings on baobab trees of Diourbel, Senegal were writing and not just pictures. Diop questions why Mauny did not ask anyone who lives there what the pictures meant in order to find out whether they were mere pictures or were some kind of writing. Instead of finding out, Mauny assumes.
When it comes to Egypt, Mauny does not take facts in their plain sense but tries to read them in a way that plays down Ancient Egypt’s blackness.
So,
- when Herodotus says the Egyptians were melanochroes (“black-skinned”),
- when American anthropologist Carleton Coon says most were brown-skinned,
- when the Egyptians painted themselves with red-brown skin, the same colour you still see in the middle and south of Egypt – and even in Senegal, as Mauny well knows –
- when the sort and amount of melanin found in the skin of pharoahs is the same as those of black Africans
Mauny still concludes that most Egyptians were Mediterranean whites, twisting or overlooking the facts at each turn, even though they all point the other way.
A historian should find out the knowable facts and then make the best sense of them possible – and not force them to fit one’s own ideas about things.
Yet this is just what Mauny accuses Diop of:
Written in Paris before 1955, it is necessarily a militant book, impregnated with the spirit of those years of struggle, during which Africans, especially students exiled in Paris in the midst of the colonizing people, were frustrated about their national history, and were preparing the paths of independence by exalting Negritude; sometimes – and this is normal – at the price perhaps unconsciously twisting impartiality and scientific truth. They recognized only that which provided arguments for their thesis, their cause.
Diop says he will let his readers be the judge of that.
See also:
The more I read about this book, the more I want it.
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Well, the french have a strange history of their very own brand of racism. One very famous case is from 1960’s when they “studied” some wild amazonian indian tribes. It was mainly made up. The tribe in question was almost destroyed by the french and american antropologists. Horrible stuff.
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@ Bulanik:
Yes, it is the same Mauny.
Franz Boas certainly fits what you say about the Germans:
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I’m ordering this book from Amazon.com today…looking forward to reading it! 😎
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Speaking of critics, this is a pretty interesting article – and, sadly, not at all unsurprising. The comments at the end are par for the course:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/23/sapphire-racism-arts
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