Myth+and+African+renaissance,+Mike+Berger,+Letters,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, Letters 22 May 2006
=Myth and Africa’s renaissance=

Xolela Mangcu’s column, Black Athena’s white professor a lesson in mastering the evidence (May 18), refers.

We have a surfeit of intellectuals in SA: government intellectuals, media intellectuals, native intellectuals, settler intellectuals and, apparently, coconut intellectuals. Perhaps we don’t have enough real intellectuals.

A useful definition is someone who does not allow his intellectual allegiances to be subject to his emotional commitments. Mangcu provides an object lesson in what to avoid.

Mangcu is an ardent admirer of Martin Bernal, the author of Black Athena, a work which purports to demonstrate that the much-vaunted Greek civilisation is really the product of Egyptian scholarship and culture; in short, an Afro-Asiatic civilisation. The conventional Greek story, according to this line of “scholarship”, is a fabrication to support an Aryan myth.

Bernal has his “detractors”, Mangcu informs us, but he is not one of them. Bernal apparently “provides an excellent example to our nationalist ideologists”.

I am no expert on the origins of Greek civilisation, but Bernal has more than his “detractors”.

Virtually the entire body of serious scholarship on the origins of the Greek civilisation is against him.

For a meticulous overview, one should read the works of Thomas Schmitz. Schmitz is an Aryan — one presumes — and thus potentially suspect, but is no raving racist himself.

In fact, he has this to say about postwar German classicists: “The excesses of German classicists ... really were racist propaganda of the worst sort”. On the other hand, Schmitz also states: “Absurd allegations like Bernal’s poison the climate of scholarly exchange. They want to score points with an audience that is already convinced.” Or, as Bernal himself states: “The political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.”

Maybe that is a good purpose, maybe not. But it is no foundation for a view of history, at least for anyone purporting to be an intellectual.

Surely, the intellectual and cultural foundations of the African renaissance should be built on truth, not a new myth, since we have seen where these lead. That’s the challenge for Mangcu and his allies.


 * Mike Berger**
 * Simon’s Town**


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A203634**

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