Since the 19th century, a strain in Black American culture has claimed ancient Egypt as ancestor and inspiration. A fascination with that long-ago land has permeated Black art deeply enough to seem like one of its very foundations. In the early 20th century, the emblem of the N.A.A.C.P. house organ, “The Crisis,” looked like a sphinx, and many covers featured beautiful Egyptian motifs. In the 1990s, many thinkers warmly embraced the book “Black Athena” by the historian Martin Bernal, which made the claim — since rather roundly debunked — that the ancient Greeks had stolen much of the glory of their culture from “Black” Egypt. So strong has this current of thought been that it fills an exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now.”
Beautiful work, make no mistake. But I have always found something problematic about this focus on ancient Egypt as a historical precursor to American Blackness. I’m going to step aside from the controversies over just what color the ancient Egyptians were. The simple fact is that Black Americans are not on the whole their descendants. They are the descendants of all of Africa, a vast and endlessly varied continent. Its peoples have warred with and until not so very long ago even enslaved one another, as rampantly as humans worldwide always have. It is home to over 2,000 languages — almost every third language in the world. Preferring and massaging the single halcyon dream of ancient Egypt misses all of that rich diversity, misreading the historical record and depriving us of the true breadth of our heritage.
Most likely not a single enslaved Black person was brought to America from Cairo or Alexandria. They were brought to America from the West African coast, from what is now Senegal down to Angola. Senegal alone is over 3,000 miles across a desert to the southwest of Cairo as the crow flies — about as far as New York City is from Anchorage or Dublin. Black America tracing itself to Egypt makes as much historical sense as would Czechs deciding to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, seek out first editions of James Joyce and favor tartans as an expression of being European.
Sure, all cultures mythologize their past to an extent. Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, “The Message,” argues that as Black people, “we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharoahs.” But we also have a right to imagine ourselves as sultans, maharajahs or New Guinea hunter-gatherers. What was wrong with what we actually were?
This question is especially urgent as the abiding fondness for the Egypt idea tends to sideline the astonishing history of the empires that enslaved Americans actually emerged from and amid. In the 13th century, the Mali Empire produced a kind of Magna Carta called the Kouroukan Fouga. It was mindful of the rights of women to a degree surprising for any document before, roughly, Ms. magazine, counseling respect for “women, our mothers.” It stipulated that a man’s insanity or impotence was justification for a woman to seek divorce. European history teaches us to associate ancient empires with the ambition of overseas exploration, and the Mali Empire was no exception. Musa, the grandson of the empire’s founder, Sundiata Keita, sent out hundreds of ships to explore the great beyond.
South of Mali in what is today Angola was the kingdom of the Kongo, which was ruled in 1625 by Manikongo Garcia II. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has described him as holding “court amid Flemish tapestries, wearing Indian linens, eating with cutlery of American silver in the company of titled Kongo nobles and bishops in red sashes, while secretaries took dictation.” His rival was the queen of the neighboring Ndongo kingdom, Nzinga Mbande. She dressed in men’s clothes and excelled as a warrior; in off hours she enjoyed male concubines. Surely a ripe source for creative imagination.
In what we now call Benin once stood the Dahomey kingdom. Its capital could boast 12 palaces, festooned with bas-relief carvings depicting the history of the kingdom, every bit as impressive as what visitors see at the Met’s Egyptian rooms. King Houegbadja, who ruled in the 17th century, went about with an entourage of female soldiers. All of this is grounds for celebration and creativity that does not require drawing an imaginary line from King Tut to Will Smith.
I suspect that one reason Black Americans are drawn to ancient Egypt is that it may seem grander, more advanced than the West African empires. But that impression is based partly on how well Egypt’s monuments have survived in desert conditions. Monuments of the West African empires, hewed from forested regions and long since grown over, can be harder to reconstruct.
The history of ancient Egypt, too, is preserved in more detail than that of most West African empires because Egypt had a writing system. But that doesn’t mean that the society was more sophisticated. Enormously complex societies thrived in antiquity without writing, such as the Catalhoyuk in Turkey and the Cahokia in Illinois.
Of course, Black Americans aren’t the only ones who fetishize ancient Egypt. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many European and American thinkers participated in an Egyptology craze. It elevated ancient Egypt, with its Rosetta Stone, Cleopatra and such as “civilized” while casting sub-Saharan Africans as dismissible primitives. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, was renowned for his contemptuous take on the sub-Saharan region he called “Africa proper” — in effect, the real Africa. For him, this region was “unhistorical” with an “undeveloped spirit”
That attitude lingered. When I was a young language-loving kid, I got a coloring book about the celebration of Christmas in 19 countries. I enjoyed it so much that I still have it. Each entry describes the customs in both English and the country’s official language. There was a serious flub, though: The description of Ethiopia’s customs was rendered in Swahili, which is not spoken in Ethiopia; its national language is Amharic, a relative of Hebrew and Arabic. By the standards of 1972 when the book was written, including an African country at all was ahead of the curve, but it seems that a residual sense of overgeneralization was still at play. I can’t see them as having described Denmark’s Christmas traditions in German.
The beauty of modern American Blackness is not a function of sphinxes, Nefertiti and hanging out with ancient Greeks. When creating and burnishing our stories, our myths, our art, we should remember where we really came from. The evidence is all around us. In the 1930s, the pioneering Black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner found speakers of the Gullah Creole language on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia who could still sing songs in the Mende language of Sierra Leone. The reason peanuts are called goobers in the South (and in the candy that’s popular at movie theater concession stands) is that they were called nguba in the Kikongo language of Angola and other countries.
Kunta Kinte, in the book and later two miniseries of “Roots,” spoke the Mandinka language of the Mali Empire. Mythology is relevant here. Alex Haley, who wrote the novel, claimed that “Roots” was based on historical sources, but it has since become clear that he largely concocted the story of his ancestors, expanding shreds of fact into fiction he later called “faction.” OK, “Roots” is legend rather than scholarship. But at least it depicts one of Black Americans’ true places of origin.
I wish we could let go of the idea that ancient Egypt is Black Americans’ common heritage. My cheek swab traces me to Senegal and Angola. Preferences will differ on this, but as for me, I get ancestral pride from my relatives here in America, such as the fierce great-aunt I knew as T.I., who could sprint up subway steps without missing a beat at 92, or Mom Springer, who was a more or less out lesbian and jazz saxophonist in the 1920s. If I need some Africa in the mix, the enlightenment of Kouroukan Fouga and the fierceness of Nzinga Mbande do me just fine.
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