8 June 2000, 806 words
Save in its geographical sense, the term "African" is absolutely meaningless. It has no linguistic meaning: there are over 1500 languages in Africa, belonging to five different families. It is not a cultural or even ethnic term. People from Africa do not normally describe themselves primarily as African. Instead, they may call themselves by their national label - Nigerian or Ghanaian or Kenyan; more frequently, they will use their tribal label - Masai or Ibo or Hutu.
Even physical appearance cannot be used as a basis for calling someone African. Africans are mainly Black, but they only became so in relatively recent times, historically speaking. The people who came to dominate Africa were Bantu, and their expansion began about 5,000 years ago, but wasn't completed till about 3,000 years later, by which time they had engulfed most of the other African peoples.
Even so, there are nowadays still five anatomically defined human groups in Africa: Blacks, Whites, Pygmies, Khoisan, and Indonesian; and even these are just anthropologically convenient classifications. North Africans, such as Egyptians or Libyans, would pass for white in the Caribbean, if not in the Nordic countries of Europe; Khoisans, formerly concentrated in southern Africa, have yellowish skin and tightly coiled hair; and the island of Madagascar, 250 miles off the East African coast, has been home for over a millennia to a people who look exactly like tropical Southeast Asians.
These are the facts. So why, then, are there people who insist that "African" is a culturally and racially meaningful term? The answer is that these persons are trying to create a socio-political construct for the purpose of political leverage. Not that they ever admit this: instead, their usual argument is that they are trying to instil pride in Black people, and doing so by correcting the negative propaganda spread by Eurocentric historians about Africa.
I think this project is doomed to fail, for three reasons. The first is that no normal person becomes self-confident because of what their ancestors achieved three thousand years ago in a different land. The second is the tacit assumption made by Afrocentrists that the average Black person considers himself inferior: people are hardly going to be persuaded by propagandists whose starting-point is contempt.
The third, and most important, reason is that the Afrocentrists simply do not base their rhetoric on hard fact. Two weeks ago, Ivan Van Sertina, a professor of African Studies, was in Trinidad providing living proof of this. While there were some true things in his public lecture - like Africa having the most advanced smelters in the world 2,000 years before Europe - Van Sertina's inaccuracies left the uninformed ignorant as to which was what.
Among Van Sertina's more amazing assertions was that ancient Africans knew the universe was expanding. His evidence? "They expressed it poetically: 'The stars are running away from us...'"
I doubt that astrophysicist George R. Carruthers, who designed the spectrograph for the Apollo16 mission, would agree. The language of science is not poetry, but mathematics. It was only in 1924 that the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, by measuring the luminosity of different stars, worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. Hubble also examined the different component colours (the spectrum) of the light given off by different stars. In 1929, he presented evidence that most galaxies were moving away from us and that therefore the universe appeared to be expanding.
Even more absurdly, Van Sertina claims that ancient Africans "knew that matter was made up of infinitely small spinning particles - atoms!" Nuclear scientist Lloyd Quaterman, whose research was used in making the atomic bomb, would probably be appalled at Van Sertina's scientific illiteracy.
First of all, atoms do not spin; 'spin' is really a characteristic of the particles that make up atoms. Second of all, a particle's spin only tells us what the particle looks like from different directions. One particle may be like a dot and looks the same from every direction, another is like an arrow and looks different from different directions, and so on.
It is important to note that nobody can know these facts about the universe or atomic particles without experimental evidence - which requires items like finely-ground lenses, radioactive materials, particle accelerators - and a coherent scientific theory. The ancient Africans had none of these, so they presumably acquired their knowledge through mystical means. And mysticism has no place in real academic discourse.
It is thus quite ironic that these so-called intellectuals claim that they are trying to revamp the image of Africans as a backward and stupid people. Because if a bigot wanted to argue that Black people are intellectually inferior, he could build a strong case by drawing his sample from these Afrocentrists. Which is why I consider the term "Afrocentric scholar" to be nothing but an oxymoron.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh