by Peter Boehm
In his opinion, the people of the “Eurasian steppe” never created a civilisation. “The civilisations attributed to them are undeniably civilisations located in the southern part of the northern hemisphere, in the heart of the Negroes countries – Egypt, Arabia, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Elam, India.”
I considered Diop’s theories to be exaggerated, but also understandable. You had to view them against the background of colonialism. For me, they were evidence of the pendulum’s swinging too far, and it was only normal that this would lead to excesses. When Diop was writing his book, a significant portion of the world was ruled by countries inhabited by white people. This could lead you to come up with all kinds of theories – about the colonising white people, but of course also about the colonised who, in this context, could easily appear as the morally superior, the peaceful and the good.
Now, however, I wanted to know what had become of these controversial theories, dating from the end of the colonial period. That was why I interviewed Aboubacry Moussa Lam. He was considered to be the most important Diop scholar.
Lam was forty-six years old, a history professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, a specialist in sub-Saharan Africa’s links with the Ancient Egyptians, and the author of a number of specialist books and two novels on this topic.
He had plain, metal-rimmed glasses, a carefully trimmed beard, and was wearing a short-sleeved, russet coloured shirt, with a loud white pattern on it.
The summery shirt was appropriate clothing for the specific conditions as Professor Lam’s air conditioning was broken. It dated from the 1940s, he said. He’d already had it repaired a couple of times. But this time he wasn’t sure whether it was worth trying again.
We met for the interview in his office, in an administration and lecture block at the university. The campus wasn’t in the final stages. The university library had just been lavishly renovated, thanks to aid from a European country. The last lectures for the semester had taken place the previous week. There were a lot of students milling in the corridor outside Professor Lam’s office, preparing to do their oral exam in a neighbouring room.
Lam’s office was furnished in the way you’d expect of a professor – he was sitting at a desk with piles of paper (he was in the process of marking seminar papers when I came in), and there was a second desk beside his, for a colleague with whom he shared the room. There was a large poster on the wall behind him, with a portrait of Cheikh Anta Diop, a large map showing the locations of prehistoric discoveries in Africa, and an old world map. There was a low filing cabinet beside it, with three antique-looking clay jars on top.
There were also two safes behind the professor, decorated with the dust covers of his books, and copies of reviews from the local paper of his most recent novel.
Following one of my questions, he would walk over to these safes to show me a quote in a book – usually one of his own. The doors were very worn near the padlocks because, each time, he’d open the safe, take the book out, show me the extract, put the book back, and lock the safe again.
I asked first about Professor Lam’s biography. He is Fula, a tribe of herdsmen living in many countries across West Africa. He talked of teachers who would rather go fishing than teach their pupils French, and gave me a full list of every school he’d attended during his childhood and teenage years.
He said that in the end, however, fate had played a significant role in this provincial schoolboy’s becoming an academic and not, for instance, a teacher in his small hometown in Senegal.
After all, Lam’s father had originally wanted his eldest son to become a marabout. But in the 1950s, France made education obligatory for all its colonial subjects, and all clans and families had to send a certain number of children to primary school in order for the heads of the families to avoid being locked up.
The father reluctantly sent Lam’s younger brother to the “white people’s school”. But he wasn’t yet five years old, so he was still too young for Class 1. This meant that their father had to send Lam himself - the future professor - whether he wanted to or not.
At the time, the country, which had only just gained its independence, particularly needed civil servants, engineers and teachers, because these areas were where the loss of the French was felt most strongly. “In those days, everyone wanted to become a teacher. I did too,” Professor Lam said.
But then fate intervened again. At the end of his studies to become a secondary school teacher, he wrote a thesis on the topic of “Relations between Egypt and Ethiopia, according to Strabo and Diodorus of Sicily”. And his tutor advised him to apply for a doctoral scholarship in France. Lam was accepted. He went to the renowned Parisian university, the Sorbonne.
Professor Lam devoted this period of his life to his strongly autobiographical novel “The triumph of Maat”. It had been published in Senegal, a year earlier, and it tells the story of the young student, Baraa Bah, who travelled from the African provinces to Paris to study Egyptology.
“The triumph of Maat” is a strange book. Baraa Bah arrives in what is probably the world’s most-visited city, but he doesn’t notice this and, what is most remarkable about the Paris in the book is that it doesn’t really feature. The book is set in a strangely abstract, closed world, and the young student’s university could just as easily be on Mars as in the French capital.
The reason for this is that “The triumph of Maat” doesn’t depict a real world, but rather seems to be an obsession which has been put into words. The book contains just as few distinctive or authentic features as a dream. This sort of thing isn’t necessary in a dream, because the dreamer knows his world anyway, and it’s the same in the book.
This is also the reason why, in “The triumph of Maat”, the young student from the Senegalese provinces doesn’t get to know the foreign city, but rather the foreign city adopts his own tribal traditions. In Paris, Baraa Bah continues to hear his traditional kora music – the kora is a West African lute – and he continues to eat his gruel, slightly seasoned with salt, nutmeg and sour milk, just as I often received in West Africa.
One of his classmates – the candid daughter of his racist supervisor – comes to visit him in his halls of residence. “What lovely music!” she exclaims, when she hears a cassette of kora recordings. She is really impressed when she tastes the stodgy gruel which Baraa has prepared with much ceremony. She eats it all, relishing it, and asks for a second helping.
Then she sees a photo of three Fula girls from Baraa’s village, and thinks “her own stupid straight hair could never handle such complicated styles as those adorning the heads of her rivals.”
How she would love to have the dark gums and the lips of these beautiful girls, even though Baraa has to explain to her “that they are the result of a very painful operation, which sometimes even costs the girls their lives”. Nonetheless, after her visit, Baraa’s classmate realises that “her superiority complex was, in reality, the result of her ignorance, her unfamiliarity with other cultures.”
In Paris, of all places, the only reason the West African gruel is not valued as a culinary speciality is that the French don’t (yet) know of it! And this is also the reason why parents there don’t have their daughters’ gums and lips tattooed when they’re children or – something you can’t see in the photo – circumcise them!
In Ethiopia, the women iron their hair to make it dead straight, and in the rest of Africa, women have plastic hair extensions to give the impression of long, straight hair. In the Paris of “The triumph of Maat”, however, Baraa’s white classmate curses her “stupid straight hair”. If this isn’t the African inferiority complex turned upside down and made into a fantasy of omnipotence, then I don’t know what it is.
The obsessive nature of “The triumph of Maat” becomes even clearer, however, in the portrayal of Baraa’s graduation. I’d read the book prior to our interview. “It effectively describes the course of my life”, the professor said.
“So you experienced everythi
ng you talk about in the book?” I asked him.
“Yes, or I heard about it from my fellow students”, he replied, without hesitation.
We’d already spoken, earlier on, about Lam’s supervisor at the Sorbonne – the renowned Egyptologist, Jean Leclant. So I asked Professor Lam whether there had really been a professor like Bah’s supervisor, Hadès Mal, at the Sorbonne, who considered all African students to be “Negroes”. “No, not like him”, the professor replied, again as though this were obvious. He didn’t consider it a contradiction.
In “The triumph of Maat”, Baraa has to assert himself against a plot between his professor and supervisor, Hadès Mal (“mal” = “bad”, or “evil” in French) and his sinister assistant. The assistant intentionally lets Baraa fail his Ancient Egyptian language course. “Don’t forget that we’ve often managed to use this decisive strategy to get rid of a lot of Negro snoopers who want to stick their dirty noses into our affairs”, Hadès Mal had advised her.
But Baraa produces the best exam of his whole class and so Maat, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of justice, has to intervene and write a good mark on his work. From then on, the assistant is cursed and has to teach the “pure truth”, namely that the Egypt of the Pharaohs was part of sub-Saharan Africa.
But of course the evil Professor Mal doesn’t give up as easily as that. Baraa proposed writing his PhD thesis on the topic of “The roots of Egyptian civilisation”. But since Mal can’t allow Baraa to destroy “the ‘scientific’ structure developed by generations of white Egyptologists”, he develops a “devilish plan” against the student he considers to be “the most dangerous Egyptology student he’d ever met”.
He lets Baraa choose his topic, and plans to wait until the end of his second year of study then to refuse it on some kind of pretext. But the day before Hadès Mal can issue the rejection of the PhD thesis, Maat again uses her divine powers. The evil Professor Mal doesn’t know what’s happening to him. In the end, he pours lavish praise on Baraa’s PhD, and everyone involved is happy and satisfied.
In real life, however, Professor Lam’s graduation took a slightly different path. Just like Baraa, the professor had originally wanted to write his thesis on the roots of Egyptian culture, but his supervisor, Jean Leclant, had advised him against it right at the outset. “Since such a general topic could easily lead me to a dead end, he advised me to focus on something concrete. And he was right”, Lam quietly admitted.
Leclant suggested that he should study Ancient Egyptian headrests, and Lam graduated, as planned, with a PhD thesis on the continuous appearance of these devices in Ancient Egypt and in sub-Saharan Africa. “Leclant led me to this path, but I was able to prove so many parallels between the ancient and the modern that, in the end, my work annoyed him more than the original topic ever would have done”, he noted, with satisfaction.
But if Leclant was so annoyed by it, why did he then also supervise Lam’s postdoctoral thesis? You see, when Lam returned to the University of Dakar, Cheikh Anta Diop had died, so there was no-one there who could have supervised his postdoctoral studies.
So Professor Hadès Mal, alias Jean Leclant, had to help again. He supervised Lam’s postdoctoral thesis and presided over the examination board. “I believe that, deep down, Leclant knows that we African academics are right”, Lam summed up. “But of course, he can’t admit it.”
Heredotus, who gave an account of the Ptolemaic Egyptians of the last centuries BC, had already stated that Egypt was the only nation in the region where circumcision was practised. This, and other parallels with today’s sub-Saharan Africa such as animism, royalty, and the organisation of society as a whole, led Cheikh Anta Diop to consider the Nile Valley to be the cradle of all sub-Saharan nations, and to thus assume these nations’ “cultural unity”.
Professor Lam continued researching the similarities between Ancient Egyptian culture and that of today’s sub-Saharan Africa. He wrote about the headrests – a wooden, ceramic or copper block, found in an identical form both in the Pharaohs’ tombs and in many African countries today. And the headrests are still used, in part, for the same ritual function – for burials. Sometimes, however, African men also use them for relaxing, and for protecting their hair when they’re asleep.
Professor Lam researched a range of tools, rakes for working in the fields, sticks, clubs and the Pharaohs’ sceptres, which the Fula and other ethnic groups in Africa still use today in exactly the same form and for exactly the same functions.
These parallels are striking, and convincing by their number. They do, however, provide a new perspective for considering Africa, which Professor Lam evidently hadn’t thought about at all.
In all corners of the world, parents try to pass on their crafts, their morals, and their way of life to their children – whether or not the society is organised along tribal lines.
But the fact that African farmers kept using the most simple of rakes while everyone around them had been using ploughs for so long, and the fact that all these features – including circumcision and other social conventions – have survived, down to the last detail, in the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa for several millennia, so, in a word, the fact that the Africans have held tenaciously to their traditions, despite their being so obviously outmoded and a hindrance to development, leads to an image of an Africa which was an unchangeable, monolithic block – and it was evidently like this for millennia.
This could only have been because the Africans held onto their traditions – so they had developed what must have been a fairly pronounced awareness of the need to preserve them.
But that wasn’t all by any means. It’s also astonishing to discover who still carries this awareness today. It’s upheld not only by the elderly men who benefit from it, but also by the women and young people who don’t benefit from it and who would want to rebel against it – or so you’d think.
This consciousness is held by almost every member of society in Africa, regardless of age, gender or social status and education, and regardless of whether they work each day in an office with new technological developments such as telephones and the Internet or anything else. They, too, hold firmly to their traditions.
And the other absolutely astonishing thing is all that has happened in Africa since – like the colonisation of the continent. And the view which supposedly goes along with it, that I have to be prepared, that I’ll be bound to encounter problems if I don’t want to be ruled by someone who doesn’t act in my interests.
Then, on the other hand, there was the liberation from the colonialists, and independence in the 1960s and 1970s.
What optimism there was in Africa in those days, what a spirit of optimism about all that Africa wanted to and could – or so it seemed at the time, at least – achieve. The hopeful image Africa had of itself then, and the favourable picture also prevalent in the Western media, can hardly be imagined today.
And then came four decades of sovereign rule, and the bitter realisation of how differently everything has, after all, turned out today, at the start of the 21st century.
Whilst, in other regions on the equator, almost all the countries are emerging markets, African has become a synonym for hunger, war and AIDS – basically for catastrophe.
And, consequently, it has also become the intervention region for humanitarian workers. The major development projects, like the building of main roads, dams and canals are, with few exceptions, financed by the European Union or the World Bank. And the smaller ones, like wells, environmental projects and hospitals, are financed by smaller aid organisations.
On the international stage, the African leaders have remained what they’d really been from the start – supplicants, whose room for manoeuvre consists of playing off one real world country against another, because it promises more aid.
With the exception of South Africa, however, there is no industry worthy of mention. And anything larger than a kiosk or a market stall is almost exclusively run by the state, or by minorities such as t
he Asians of Indian origin in East Africa, the Lebanese in West and Central Africa, and the whites in southern Africa.
So, after these four decades of self rule, can you really talk of national sovereignty, independence and emancipation, when the aid workers come from precisely those countries which were once the colonial powers?
So it is clear that humiliation is the only trace colonisation has left in Africa – although it could well have been the introduction of modernity to a traditional world. So the path to so-called western development is blocked. This has injected new life into the monolithic, ancient tradition and has provided it with a new justification. This is why many African intellectuals are still fighting against “western” progress, and so coming back to tradition.
Following all the defeats, disappointments and bitter insights, the greater the separation from the real world and dependency on it, the clearer it must become to everyone in Africa that their tradition can’t help them, and the more educated Africans are, the more comprehensively they are thrown back to their traditions. That’s the irony. And that’s how someone ends up going to Paris, and then returning more certain of the value of his traditions than he had been when he’d set off.