July 27 2000, 805 words
"An extraterrestrial visiting Earth 10,000 years ago might have been forgiven for predicting that Europe would end up as a set of vassal states of a sub-Saharan African empire," writes anthropologist Jared Diamond.
Of course, that wasn't what happened. Instead, Europe colonised Africa and conquered its peoples. The Europeans had better weapons and technology, widespread literacy and the political organization needed for exploration and conquest.
"That it was not the other way around is especially surprising, because Africa was the sole cradle of human evolution for millions of years, as well as perhaps the homeland of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. To these advantages of Africa's enormous head start were added those of highly diverse climates and habitats," says Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel.
So what happened? Well, geography, for one thing. Africa's major axis is north-south, whereas Eurasia's is east-west. This meant that the dissemination of knowledge (of domesticated crops and animals and new technologies) was slower in Africa than in Eurasia.
"As one moves along a north-south axis, one traverses zones differing greatly in climate, habitat, rainfall, day length, and diseases of crops and livestock," Diamond explains. "Hence, crops and animals acquired in one part of Africa had great difficulty in moving to other parts. In contrast, crops and animals moved easily between Eurasian societies thousands of miles apart but in the same latitude."
Diamond's book is the only scientific history ever written, and in it he uses ecology, climate and natural resources to explain why different continents and different peoples advanced at different rates and in different ways. Eurasia had large animals - cows, horses, sheep, goats, pigs - amenable to domestication. Africa - with elephants, rhinos, zebras, buffalo - had none.
Africa also had fewer domesticable plants than the Mediterranean's Fertile Crescent, and it was agriculture which was the basis of all civilizations. (It is not coincidental that Egypt had the same climate as the Fertile Crescent and so was able to grow crops like wheat, barley, beans and peas.)
These are the hard factors which explain why Eurasian nations and their peoples became dominant in the modern world. But, in this Emancipation week, you will not hear any such facts from the Afrocentrists in our midst . Instead, you are more likely to hear nonsense about how ancient Africans knew about the atom and the expanding universe. It isn't just that all Afrocentrists are badly educated - it is also that they are often more racial than the white people they oppose.
John McWhorter, a (Black) linguist at Berkely College, holds that, "Afrocentrist History [is] primarily founded upon a fragile assemblage of misreadings of classical texts to construct a scenario under which Ancient Egypt was a 'black' civilization raped by the Ancient Greeks who therefore owed all notable in their culture to them. Professional classicists easily point out the errors in these claims, only to have their proponents dismiss them as racists for having even asked the question. Indeed, to insist upon facts, or apparently to master the complex classical languages which the original documents were written in, is 'inauthentic'."
For the same reasons, you will not hear from the Afrocentrists that, whereas in 1963 only 10 percent of white Americans approved of black-white dating, in 1995 65 percent approved. Afrocentrists will not speak about opinion polls which show that the most highly regarded immigrant groups in the United States are Japanese, Africans, and Chinese, in that order. Nor will you hear from them that three-quarters of African-American families have incomes above the poverty line, with 49 in100 having middle-class incomes.
And you would hardly find among their list of Black Heroes people like Kenneth Chenault, president and chief operations officer at American Express; or Ann Fudge, president of Maxwell House; or Richard D. Parsons, president of Time-Warner Inc. Such successful Black persons, in their view, are only part of the "white establishment".
Afrocentrists, you see, are interested in power, not progress. The factors cited by Diamond explain why some regions became more technologically and politically complex than others over the past 10,000 years. But, in the modern world, these factors no longer determine progress. Technology flows readily across borders, and democracy is now accepted as the political foundation of economic stability. But borders are determined by politics, and democracy depends on principled leaders.
Afrocentrists typically badtalk both science and democracy as Western ideologies inappropriate to an 'African' ethos. They promote superstition in the name of tradition, tribalism in the name of politics, and irrationality in the name of truth. No people can achieve peace and prosperity in the 21st century by adhering to such values. That is why I consider the Afrocentrists to be among the worst enemies of the very people they claim they want to uplift.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh