ATTACKING AFROCENTRISM

By John Elson

SOCRATES, THAT QUINTESSENTIAL Athenian, was black. And the ancient Greeks stole most of their great intellectual discoveries, including philosophy and geometry, from their African originators, the Egyptians.

Such eye-catching assertions, which beg the disputable question of whether the Egyptians actually were black, are being promoted by radical Afrocentrists in college classrooms across the U.S. today. The principal goal is to free the teaching of world history from its traditional Euro-focus. A secondary aim is to give minority students pride in the achievements of their ancestors. Up to a point these are unexceptionable goals, concedes Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of humanities at Wellesley. But in a fierce little polemic called Not Out of Africa (BasicBooks; 222 pages; $24), she argues that the Afrocentrists substitute pseudo history for the real thing. As she writes, "The ancient Egypt described by Afrocentrists is a fiction."

The argument for Socrates' African origins, for example, is based largely on posthumous portraits that show him having a snub nose and broad mouth. But this is hardly conclusive, Lefkowitz contends, since the Greeks also portrayed the Scythians of Russia as having these supposedly Negroid features. Moreover, if Socrates had been part African, that fact would surely have been satirized by his critics, like the comic playwright Aristophanes.

The most substantive Afrocentrist charge against the Greeks--that they stole their best thoughts from Egypt--is not a new argument. As Lefkowitz notes, the Greek historian Herodotus thought the Egyptians believed souls could transmigrate from human to animal form; he apparently did not know that the Egyptians had no such faith, as their elaborate funerary rituals make clear.

Afrocentrists claim that Greek philosophy is based on an Egyptian "mystery system," embodied in the secret initiation rites of certain ancient religious cults. Lefkowitz makes the ingenious but plausible argument that the little we know about those ceremonies comes not from historical sources but from an 18th century novel, Sethos, by the French Abbe Jean Terrasson (1670-1750). His fanciful speculations about old Egypt were incorporated into Masonic rituals. Thus the Afrocentrists' purported knowledge of Egypt, Lefkowitz contends, can be traced back to the mystical lore of black Masonic lodges in the West Indies.

Lefkowitz's book is an amplification of a controversial article she wrote for the New Republic in 1992, after learning that Afrocentric "myths" were being taught as fact on her own campus. Students called the author a racist for publicly challenging the assertions of an Afrocentrist guest lecturer. More shocking to her was the silence of colleagues who, though they shared her opinions of Afrocentrist teaching, refused to speak up lest they be judged politically incorrect.

The real problem with Afrocentrism, Lefkowitz concludes, is not that its "truths" about Greece and Egypt are false. More dangerous is the underlying attitude that all history is fiction, which can be manipulated at will for political ends. The enthronement of this view on campus, Lefkowitz warns, means the death of academic discourse as we know it. Sadly, that seems to be happening. Better for all if Not Out of Africa stirs an equally fierce--and fair--polemic from the other side.

--By John Elson