by Peter Watson
In the mid-1970s, aware that the Mao era in China was coming to an end, Martin Bernal began to sense that ‘the central focus of danger and interest in the world’ was the east Mediterranean, and he began to study Jewish history. There were, he says, ‘scattered Jewish components’ in his own ancestry, and an interest in his roots led him to study ancient Jewish history and the surrounding peoples. This led to an examination of early Mediterranean languages for the light they threw on prehistory, in particular the ancestry of classical Greece. His research took him ten years before it appeared in book form, but when it was published, it proved very subversive. Bernal eventually demonstrated to his own satisfaction that classical Greek culture – the very basis of the canon – did not develop of its own accord in ancient Greece around 400 BC, as traditional scholarship has it, but was actually derived from North African peoples who were black.
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (1987–91) is a massive three-volume work incorporating and synthesising material in philology, archaeology, history, historiography, biblical studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and much else, and so it is not easy to do justice to Bernal’s complex arguments.22 In essence, however, he makes the following points. One is that North Africa, in the form of ancient Egypt – several of whose dynasties were black, in the sense of Negroid – was the predominant influence on classical Greece; that there were extensive trading links; that ancient Egypt was a military power in the area; that many place names in Greece show North African influence; and that the finding of objects of North African origin at classical Greek sites cannot be dismissed as casual trading exchanges. No less controversially, Bernal also claimed that this view of Greece was ‘standard,’ had always prevailed in European scholarship, until it was deliberately ‘killed off by ‘racist’ north European scholars in the early nineteenth century, men who wanted to show that Europe, and northern Europe at that, had a monopoly on creative and imaginative thought, that civilisation as we know it was born in Europe, all as one of a number of devices to help justify colonialism and imperialism.23
Bernal believed that there was once a people who spoke Proto-Afro-Asiatic-Indo-European, which gave rise to all the peoples and languages we see on these continents today. He believes that the break between Afro-asiatic and Indo-European came in the ninth millennium B.C. and that the spread of Afro-Asiatic was the expansion of a culture, long established in the East African Rift Valley at the end of the last ice age in the tenth and ninth millennia BC. These people domesticated cattle and food crops and hunted hippopotamus. Gradually, with the spread of the Sahara, they moved on, some down the Nile valley, some into Saudi Arabia and thus into Mesopotamia, where the first ‘civilisations’ arose.24 Furthermore, civilisation, including writing, developed across a swath of Asia, stretching from India to North Africa, and was in place by 1100 BC or earlier. Bernal introduces evidence of a succession of Upper Egyptian black pharaohs sharing the name Menthope who had as their divine patron the hawk and bull god, Mntw or Mont. ‘It is during the same century that the Cretan palaces were established and one finds the beginnings there of the bull-cult which appears on the walls of the palaces and was central to Greek mythology about King Minos and Crete. It would therefore seem plausible to suppose that the Cretan developments directly or indirectly reflected the rise of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.’25 But this is only a beginning. Bernal examined classical Greek plays, such as Aeschylus’s The Supplicants, for Egyptian influences; he looked at correspondences between their gods and functions; he looked at loan words, river and mountain names (Kephisos, the name of rivers and streams found all over Greece with no explanation, he derives from Kbh, ‘a common Egyptian river name “Fresh” ‘). In a chapter on Athens, he argues that this name is derived from the Egyptian Ht Nt: ‘In Antiquity, Athena was consistently identified with the Egyptian goddess Nt or Neit. Both were virgin divinities of warfare, weaving and wisdom. The cult of Neit was centred on the city of Sais in the Western delta, whose citizens felt a special affinity with the Athenians.’26 And so on into pottery styles, military terms, and the meaning of the sphinxes.
The second half of Bernal’s book follows the writings of scientists and others in the Renaissance, men like Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, to show that they accepted the Egyptian influence on Greece much more readily than later scholars. Following the French Revolution, however, Bernal discerns a reaction by Christians against the threat of the ‘wisdom’ of Egypt, and a rise of ‘Hellenomania.’ He describes a series of German, British, and French scholars, all more or less racist in outlook (anti-black and anti-Semitic), who he says deliberately played down the significance of Egypt and North Africa generally. In particular, he singles out Karl Otfried Müller, who ‘used the new techniques of source criticism to discredit all the ancient references to the Egyptian colonisations, and weaken those concerning the Phoenicians.’27 According to Bernal, Müller was anti-Semitic and denied the Phoenicians any role in the creation of ancient Greece, an approach other scholars built on in the years 1880–1945, resulting in the Greeks being given ‘a semi-divine status.’ In essence, Bernal says, classical studies as we know them today are a nineteenth-century creation, and false.
Bernal’s book evoked a detailed response, which appeared in 1996 under the tide Black Athena Revisited, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, both of Wellesley College.28 Here a collection of scholars – from America, Italy, and Britain, and including Frank Snowden, a distinguished classics professor from Howard University, a black institution – concluded that Martin Bernal was wrong on almost every count, except perhaps that of causing classicists to look at themselves with a more questioning mind. In particular, they concluded that (a) ancient Egypt wasn’t black; (b) its influence on classical Greece, while not nonexistent, was not predominant either; and (c) by no means all of the scholars promoting the ‘Aryan’ view of the past were antiSemites or romanticists. Bernal’s revised dating of certain allegedly key events in Egyptian-Greek history was based on faulty radiocarbon readings; analysis of ancient Egyptian skeletons and skulls shows that they were comprised of a variety of peoples, closest to racial types from the Sudan but not to those of West Africa, the most negroid of all. Analysis of ancient art, and ancient Greek, Roman, and other languages, shows that the Egyptians were regarded as very different from traditional ‘black’ groups, the Aithiopes or Aesthiopes (Ethiopians), literally ‘burnt-faced peoples.’29 Frank Snowden showed that in classical times the Ethiopians were used, by Herodotus among others, as the yardstick in blackness and in their style of ‘woolly’ hair. Nubians were seen as not as black as Ethiopians but blacker than the Egyptians, who were darker than the Moors. Bernal claimed that various Greek city names – Methone, Mothone, and Methana – went back to the Egyptian mtwn, meaning ‘bull fight, bull arena.’ But other scholars pointed out that methone means a ‘theatrical-looking harbour,’ and all the cities referred to by Bernal were exactly that.30 On the matter of racism, Guy Rogers took Bernal to task for singling out George Grote as an anti-Semite, when in fact Grote was associated with the founding of University College, London, in 1829, one specific aim of which was to offer higher education to groups excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, namely Nonconformists, Catholics, and Jews.31
Bemal was accused of doing more harm than good, of throwing in his lot with other writers like C. A. Diop, who in The African Origin of Civilisation (1974) had ‘falsified’ history in portraying Egyptians as black, and of ignoring evidence that went against the hypothesis (for example, that mythical beasts on many Greek vases were inspired by Near Eastern motifs rather than North African ones).32 Many scholars shared the view of Mary Lefkowitz, one of the editors of Black Athena Revisited, that Bernal’s ideas were no more than ‘Afrocentric fantasies,’ and his description of the Egyptians as black ‘misleading in the extreme.’ ‘For black Americans (many of whom now prefer to be known as African-Americans), the African origins of ancient Greek civilisation promise a myth of self-
identification and self ennoblement, the kind of “noble lie” that Socrates suggests is needed for the Utopian state he describes in Plato’s Republic.’33 The issue is not settled and perhaps cannot hope to be. For this is only partly an intellectual debate. Exploring the alleged racism behind the theorising was just as much part of Bernal’s ‘project’ as was the substantive result.
These ‘culture wars’ were accompanied by ‘history wars’ and ‘curriculum wars,’ but they were all essentially the same thing: a fight between traditionalists and postmodernists.
One of the more bitter engagements arose over plans to mount an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. Among the exhibits was a reconstructed Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 bomber that had actually dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.34 After its historic mission, Enola Gay had a chequered history. For many years its disassembled components could be seen, by appointment only, in a suburban Maryland warehouse, so that it was for all practical purposes hidden from sight. Following representations from B-29 veterans, its restoration was eventually begun at the end of 1984, and as the anniversary of World War II approached, the possibility of displaying the plane began to rise. Even so, there were those wary of doing so in view of what Enola Gay represented. For many, there was nothing of unusual aeronautical interest in this B-29, merely its mission and its ‘equipment.’
When the decision was taken to mark the anniversary at the NASM, the idea grew at the Smithsonian that the exhibition should be not only a celebration of a military and technical victory but an examination of the use of atomic weapons and the opening of the nuclear age. Here the problems began, for many veterans and service organisations wanted a more propagandistic approach, more of a celebration than an examination of issues. When the various service organisations saw the script for the exhibition – 300 pages of text, which became available eighteen months before the start of the show – they didn’t like it. It was too ‘dark.’ Beginning in the pages of Air Force Magazine, the objections spread, taking in the media, the Pentagon, and Congress.35 It seemed that almost everyone except the historians wanted the exhibition to be a celebration, not raising uncomfortable questions about whether the decision to drop the atomic bomb had been correct. Forty historians wrote to President Clinton soliciting his support for the exhibition as a serious piece of history, but it did no good. In January 1995 it was announced that the exhibition was cancelled and was being replaced by a much less contentious show, more celebratory in tone. At the same time, the director of the Smithsonian also resigned. The decision to cancel the exhibition was widely welcomed in certain sections of the press and in Congress, where Newt Gingrich said that ‘people’ were ‘taking back’ their history from elites.36
The academic world had been the focus of Allan Bloom’s initial attack and defended by Stanley Fish and others. Not surprisingly, the university itself came under scrutiny in a series of surveys, in particular what was taught and how. The first of these, and the most intemperate, was Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, published in 1990.37 Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, a conservative cultural and intellectual journal, had the idea of attending a number of seminars at various universities and amalgamating his account of them into a book. These conferences included ‘Architecture and Education: The Past Twenty-Five Years and Assumptions for the Future,’ a day-long symposium sponsored by the Princeton School of Architecture in 1988; another was a panel discussion at the Williams College convocation in 1989; and a third was the publication, in 1986, of a volume of essays taken from a conference at Stanford University, entitled Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought.38 Kimball found very little to admire or like in what he saw. He thought that most of the postmodernists showed an ‘eclectic’ mix of left-wing idea that were a hangover of the radical 1960s, owing a great deal to Marcuse’s notion of ‘repressive tolerance.’ He devoted a chapter to Paul de Man and to Stanley Fish, and he had great fun deriding what are admittedly some of the wilder excesses of postmodernist thought.39 He conceded that politics do influence artistic judgements but denied that, in the final analysis, they determine them.
But Kimball’s book was essentially an hysterical reaction, journalistic rather than considered. A more thoughtful response came from Dinesh d’Souza, an Indian who had emigrated to America in the late 1970s. His Illiberal Education: The Politics of Sex and Race on Campus appeared in 1991 and was an examination of six campuses in America – Berkeley, Stanford, Howard, Michigan, Duke, and Harvard – and how they dealt with the issues of sex and race, both in their admissions policy and in their teaching.40 D’Souza’s approach was statistical but not heavily so; he used figures where they were appropriate but also looked beyond them. At Berkeley, for instance, he quoted a confidential, internal report which showed that, after five years, only 18 percent of blacks admitted on affirmative action completed their courses, whereas 42 percent of blacks admitted to the regular program had graduated. D’Souza’s response was not hysterical, however. He admitted that one could look at the figures in two ways – as a sort of success and a sort of failure. His own idea was that these very students, ‘California’s best black and Hispanic students,’ might have fared better at other campuses, ‘where they might settle in more easily, compete against evenly matched peers, and graduate in vastly greater numbers and proportions.’41 He then looked at Stanford, where the faculty had, amid much controversy, dropped the Western civilisation course and replaced it with ‘Culture, Ideas, Values’ (CIV), which was intended to stress other values, ideas, and cultures besides the Western. He gave a list of the kind of works to be included in the ‘Europe and Americas’ track.
Poets: José Maria Arguedas, Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Audre Lorde, Aimé Césaire
Drama: Shakespeare, Euripedes
Fiction: García Márquez, Naipaul, Melville, Hurston, Findley, Rulfo, Ferre
Philosophy: Aristotle, Rousseau, Weber, Freud, Marx, Fanon, Retamar, Benedict
History: James, Guaman Poma
Diaries: Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Equiano, Lady Nugent, Dyuk, Augustine, Menchu, Barrios de Chungara
Culture: Films on popular religion and healing in Peru (‘Eduardo the Healer’) and the US (‘The Holy Ghost People’)
Music: Reggae lyrics, Rastafarian poetry, Andean music
D’Souza emphasised that this list was not mandated: ‘Stanford professors are given flexibility as long as they ensure “substantial representation” for the Third World.’42 Yet he was very critical of the way Shakespeare was taught, as primarily a function of ‘colonial, racial and gender forces,’ and he singled out I, Rigoberta Menchu, subtitled ‘An Indian Woman in Guatemala,’ as a typical new text, which was dictated to someone else because Rigoberta did not write. The book conveys much mundane information, especially about her family life, but spliced in among all this is her political awakening. D’Souza evinces scepticism as to how typical, or moving, or aesthetic, the book is; Rigoberta is said to speak for all native Americans, but among her experiences she goes to Paris to attend international conferences. (Later, in 1998, it emerged that Rigoberta Menchu had made up many of the experiences she reports in the book.)
D’Souza also took on Stanley Fish and Martin Bernal and quoted distinguished scholars, from David Riesman to E. O. Wilson and Willard van Orman Quine, who said they were distressed by the trends in American higher education.43 D’Souza’s final point was that when one puts together the dismal results from affirmative action alongside the new courses on third-world cultures and ideas, there is a major risk of replacing an old form of racism with a new one. ‘In one sense, the new racism is different, however. The old racism was based on prejudice, whereas the new racism is based on conclusions…. The new bigotry is not derived from ignorance, but fr
om experience. It is harbored not by ignoramuses, but by students who have direct and first-hand experience with minorities in the close proximity of university settings. The “new racists” do not believe they have anything to learn about minorities; quite the contrary, they believe they are the only ones willing to face the truth about them … they are not uncomfortable about their views…. They feel they occupy the high ground, while everyone else is performing pirouettes and somersaults to avoid the obvious.’44
Not everyone found American campus life so bleak. Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, has taught all over the continent. Her book Cultivating Humanity appeared in 1997 and concerned not six but fifteen ‘core institutions,’ chosen to represent different types of higher-education outfit – the Ivy League elite, large state universities, small liberal arts colleges, religious universities like Notre Dame, Brandeis, and Brigham Young.45 Approaching her task as a classicist – the subtitle of her book was ‘A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education’ – she argued that even ancient Athens, the crucial point of reference for conservative critics of multiculturalism, was more open to alternative views than these critics like to acknowledge. Nussbaum’s model was drawn from Socrates and the Stoics, who, she said, established three ‘core values’ of liberal education – critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination.46
Nussbaum’s message, from a greater number of campuses than anyone else had looked at, is that the number of extremists in universities is much less than anyone thinks, that there is a great appetite for, and interest in, philosophy, other cultures, and other lifestyles, that these courses are growing because they are popular among students rather than because a left-wing faculty is forcing them on pupils, and that when they are taught, they are taught far more often than not with a commendable academic rigour. There are, Nussbaum says, many ways for the imaginative teacher to bring home to students the relevance of the classics and philosophy: for example, in one class in Harvard the students are asked, Would Socrates have been a draft resister? She argues that Athens took seriously the idea of world citizenship and quotes Herodotus considering the possibility that Egypt and Persia might have something to teach Athens about social values.47 She finds it not at all odd that Amartya Sen teaches a course at Harvard called ‘Hunger and Famine,’ in which standard ideas about economics are given a new twist. She finds that the tragic form in the narrative imagination is especially powerful in crossing cultural boundaries – its universality and abstractness especially useful in drawing people together.48 She notes that, again, in ancient Athens the moral and the political went hand-in-hand, and asks if it is really possible to read George Eliot or Dickens without detachment and get from them all that there is. She too invokes Lionel Trilling and The Liberal Imagination, drawing from it the lesson that ‘the novel as genre is committed to liberalism in its very form, in the way in which it shows respect for the individuality and the privacy of each human mind.’49 The study of nonWestern cultures, she says, is there to help combat what she calls ‘the descriptive vices’ – chauvinism and romanticism – and ‘the normative vices’ – chauvinism (again), arcadianism, and scepticism. She shows that many in the West have traditionally overestimated the extent to which Western culture is individualistic and Eastern culture is the opposite, and spends some time showing how individualistic non-Western societies can be. She applies the same approach to courses in African-American studies and women’s studies (she argues, for instance, that the sociobiologists base their theories in part on chimpanzees, but never on Bonobos, another primate, not discovered till 1929, whose ‘graceful and non-aggressive’ style differs sharply from that of the chimp). She found Notre Dame University (Catholic) much more open to matters that in theory ought to have been an intellectual threat than, say, Brigham Young (Mormon), and as a result the former was still changing, still popular, while the latter languished.50 In other words, Nussbaum is saying that once you go out and investigate the campuses, what is actually happening is much less sensational, much less worrying, much more worthwhile, than appears to be the case from the headlines. She was not the first person to find that evidence is a healthy counterweight to prejudice; that, after all, is what distinguishes scholarship proper from mere journalism.