2005-10-03,+Early+Egypt+was+a+black+civilisation,+Asante,+City+Press


 * City Press, Johannesburg, 01/10/2005 18:18 - (SA)**

= **The truth is: early Egypt was a black civilisation** =


 * By Molefi Kete Asante**

NOW that the American and European public is once again being presented the jewels of the young black king, Tutankhamen (the most famous Egyptian pharaoh who died in his late teens and remained at rest for over 3300 years) we can get ready for an onslaught of racist interpretations about the "whiteness" of the ancient Egyptians.

As if they could somehow wipe out the entire history of the ancient classical world of Africa, the racist interpreters and explainers will be put to good use in the next few months as the exhibit of King Tutankhamen's jewels make its way from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art eastward across America and perhaps to Africa and Europe.

In my book, //The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism//, I tried to explain how Europe sought to keep Africa and Africans separated from the continuity of history by proposing the enslavement and colonisation of Africans as permanent conditions of African history.

Indeed, the history of Africa and Africans represents one of the great epic stories of humanity. It becomes, by virtue of Africa being the home of the human race, the central story of human civilisation. The Nile Vallley civilisations, including Nubia, Ethiopia and Kemet, the latter called Egypt by the Greeks, are at the heart of Africa's distribution and dissemination of knowledge.

From the day Howard Carter robbed the tomb of the ancient king, European and white Americans have been trying to explain away this incredible "find" in the Valley of the Kings. Tutankhamen was a minor king in the long history of Egypt, never to be compared with Ramses II, Tuthmoses III, Senurset I, Mentuhotep I, Pepy, or his relative, Akhenaten in making history.

Nevertheless, the discovery of the tomb of the young boy king in l926 made a memorable impression on the world because of the extent of the wealth associated with his burial. There were gilded chairs, golden slippers, jewels of all kind, faience beads, turquoise, accoutrements of royalty of every conceivable type, and many ordinary clothing items, even underwear, of the king of Egypt.

Thus, an African, who had been given the name "Tutankhaton," later changed to "Tutankhamen", meaning the "living image of Amen", because of the political transition in Egypt, had become an icon of Western artistic and cultural lore.

What are we to make of the hordes of Westerners now descending upon this new presentation of King Tutankhamen to the public? What will they say to another generation? Will they, like their ancestors, try to rip King Tutankhamen away from Africa by claiming that "we do not know if he was white or black", or saying that "it does not really matter where he was born or among what people" or insisting that "Egypt was a part of the Western world," hence, European, and furthermore, white world.

They will never make these same arguments about Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle. The element of "disbelief" enters anytime whites talk about African achievements. Now that the tomb of King Tutankhamen is being displayed again throughout America and Europe, you can depend upon new interpretations of the boy king's racial or ethnic history.

You can be certain that the white reviewers and commentators will try something. It is not possible, given the mystique created by the Western world about its relationship to the most dazzling civilisation in the history of the world and it is still an active belief that Europeans are smarter than anyone else, for Europeans to relinquish this conceptual hold on Egypt as non-African.

Egypt was precisely an African development. It was like China in Asia and much later Greece in Europe, the classical standard of its own continent. The early Greeks, coming to Egypt, many years after Egypt had gone through three golden eras, had no difficulty understanding that the Egyptians were black-skinned people with woolly hair.

From the time of Homer in the 8th Century BC to the time of the Greek conquest under Alexander of Macedonia in 333 BC, Egypt was accepted as a black civilisation. The farther back in history you go, the blacker Egypt becomes. There are no blonds, no blue eyes, and no people feeling superior to others because of their physical characteristics.

It was not even a brown civilization; the word used in the ancient texts is the word for black, not brown and certainly not white. Melanchroes in Greek means literally "black-skinned". This is the word used by many Greek writers who saw Egyptians seven to eight hundred years after Tutankhamen. So if the people of Egypt were "still" black during the time of Herodotus, for example, they must have been really black eight hundred years earlier.

Black parents, white parents, be on your guard against the possibility of false information about King Tutankhamen. If the exhibitors really wanted to do something positive they would insure that the viewing public sees King Tutankhamen, as he lived, as a black man! Now, that would be a really fantastic educational and accurate historical act on the part of the museums displaying the royal jewels from one of Africa's earliest civilizations.

Unfortunately, the convergence of the current Egyptian society's demand for tourists and the white world's demand for whiteness come together in a cruel disaster for an African truth. Arabs did not create ancient Egypt. Arabic is not the indigenous language of ancient Egypt. The ancient Africans of the Nile Valley who created the civilisation of King Tutankhamen and his ancestors were neither Christians nor Muslims. The monuments of the Nile Valley are monuments of black African people. Neither the various populations of Greeks, Albanians, Russians, French, Turks, or Arabs, the latter really coming in 639 AD, had anything to do with the creation of the ancient African monuments one sees in Egypt.

Until Africans awake and re-take the intellectual idea that ancient Egypt is directly related to the traditional African cultures we will not be able to write a proper history of the continent. All of the people in southern Africa are related to the Nile Valley civilisations inasmuch as we know that the origin of the human race is in East Africa.

I am appalled at the lack of intellectual and academic interest in this subject among African people. Of course, I have some understanding of what it means to be culturally dominated, victimised by intellectual imperialism, and stunted in our academic growth by Europe defining for us what we can and should study.

The time has come for Africans to respond to these challenges in a proactive manner where universities encourage our students to do archaeology and ancient African history as a way of rewriting the textbooks on African history. This is a job for African people.

Europe turned our heads towards itself and thereby created confusion and disorientation. We no longer remember that the Ming Dynasty Chinese sailor Cheng He came to East and SA in the 1420s before the Portuguese or that four African missions were made to China during the same time period.

We remain the only race of people whose history is dominated by books written by another race. This is not correct; it is a symptom of the Eurocentric hegemony that has created avenues to dispossess our people of land, memory, and vigilance. What if the European scholar, operating from a racist foundation, suggests that ancient Egypt was Caucasian?

We must be willing to point to all the research that shows the ancient Egyptians were black skinned. We must know the works of Cheikh Anta Diop, Charles Finch, Theophile Obenga, Alain Anselm, Jean-Phillipe Omotunde, and other younger scholars in Africa and America now engaged in this research.

Nothing must go unchallenged if it has been promoted as a fact by Europe. Don Luke, one of my former students, studied the African presence in Scandinavian sagas, after studying the Middle English language. This is a subject that a white professor would have shied him away from for a Ph.D. What he revealed was important because it showed that Africans had travelled to Scandinavia long before the current era.

I have taken this digression from the main theme of King Tutankhamen because it is one and the same issue. Soon the Western nations, because of their financial power, will be trying to sell the same exhibits of King Tutankhamen to museums in the African continent itself. This is why I am suggesting that a whole phalanx of scholars be prepared in the universities to combat any attempt by Europe to claim Africa's ancestral heritage.

Tutankhamen was black. All of the statues of him are black. His mother and grandmother were black. His father was black. His wife and children were black. He was neither brown-haired nor blond-haired; he was a young black man whose early death meant that he did not achieve anything of great significance except to leave for posterity evidence of his wealth and his powerful images as a black man.

Asante is the founder of the Afrocentric Movement in the United States From: http://www.news24.com/City_Press/Features/0,,186-1696_1809709,00.html