In Pursuit of an African Classics: The Life Work of Dr. Graham Campbell-Dunn

          Interview by Dana

"There are very few scholars doing serious work on Linear A. They have not solved the problem themselves so think it is insoluble, and they are not receptive to unknowns such as myself. The attitude to me seems to be 'Lets ignore him and hope he goes away'". 

So writes Graham Campbell-Dunn, one of the many pioneers in the study of African influences in early historic cultures of the Aegean and early Eurasia. He claims not to be a "controversialist" yet one would never know it by some of the statements one can find in his books. In one of his latest publications, Who were the Minoans: An African Answer, he writes, "The Minoans as we shall see spoke an African language".

Representation of a Minoan female

Elsewhere in the book we read, "Africans colonised Sumeria at an early date, as place names show" and also, "The Etruscans we now know were African"! As if the title of his book werent provocative enough, Dr. Dunn posits throughout his text (and in his other books) theorizes that only the most thoroughly versed in the areas of both African and Mediterranean archeology, anthropology and linguistics would ever take seriously. In fact, judging by Western academias aversion to Martin Bernals theories in his Black Athena volumes, scholars who are focused mainly on the linguistics and history of early classical and ancient civilizations would likely have a very difficult time considering many assertions in Dunns books as anything but outlandish.

For one thing, they run counter to the pervasive anti-diffusionist theory and independent development streams of thought that have come to flood anthropological schools of thinking. Furthermore, they upset the status quo and are opposed by those who think Africans contributed little to culture north of the Sahara, but were rather, essentially peoples influenced by older and more complex civilizations of non-African origin and/or European affiliation.

It may be that some of the criticism and a small amount of peer review that Dunns work has received in the past decades is deserved. Dunn admits that some of what he has written is rather outdated. However, to play devils advocate, certain of the theories and assertions presented in his books - apparently meant mostly for laymen - are not always well-supported within the text, although they are so, presumably, outside of them. For example, stating the Philistines came from Egypt based on Biblical text and then moving to the notion that scribes and Pharisees mentioned with them in the Bible must therefore be Niger-Congo scribes and the Barisi tribe is probably more than pushing the limit of whats acceptable in academia. There probably are far too many statements of this sort in the books Dr. Dunn has authored, even if they were meant for the layman. 

If Hellanicus links the Philistines with the Phoenicians as Dunn states on p. 8 of his book, this would imply an Afro-Asiatic connection of the Pelasgians rather than a Niger-Congo one. The place names Larissa and Dodona, he states, "look African" as in Niger-Congo African.

The name "Larissa", for example, Dunn would make a relative of the word "Lari" meaning "the old ones" in the Congo dialect. However, other classical or Middle Eastern scholars, including Bernal, connect the name Larissa to the semitic El Arish, while the name Dodona is oft connected by ancient writers with that of Rhoda and the Rhodones, which would also link it to the name of the Afro-Asiatic (Afro-Arabian or semitic), Ruda. 

Nevertheless, there are other connections made in Graham Campbell-Dunn's books that frequently offset the more suspect declarations - those that would be regarded by most Western academics as incredulous. Similarities in burial and tomb types as existed between Philistines and Minoans may be evidence that Philistines were among the early "Pelasgian" or proto-Hellenic groups of the Aegean. Apparently they both used partial golden face masks and made use of Mycenaean type Tholoi or beehive shaped tombs typical of Afro-Asiatics (kushitic/semitic-speakers) in Africa and Arabia.

As one somewhat erudite critic of Dunn's work on Amazon.com has recently pointed out, although some claims are thought not worthy of consideration, "much harder to ignore is his comparison of the Vai script with Linear A, and his identification of linear A symbols with concepts (compared with Egyptian hieroglyphics) and reconstructed monsyllabic words of Proto-Niger-Congo."

Vai is a Mande language and the Vai syllabary which is actually said to have been invented in the 19^th century, never-the-less uses intrinsically African symbols, including "figure of eight" shields, also linked to modern shields of cattle herders in Africa. Cretan palaces of the Minoan period were decorated with these figures of 8 shields.

Also, for any individual knowledgeable of the archeology of African burials in Nubia and North Africa, mention of the distinct similarities between Cretan and early Libyan/Sudanese (Fulani?) tomb types by Dunn and others is very potent evidence of African influence.

There is another important thing that can be said and that is, the Philistines, a people who appear in color wearing Aegean outfits on the temple of Medinet Habu walls, do otherwise seem to have a quite striking likeness to phenotypically to the lesser modified groups of Fulani, as seen in the Woodabe clan and other pastoralist Fulani in parts of the northern Sahel. The Philistines are depicted as not so much a dark red as a dark copper brown which in truth is a more accurate description of the Fulani people then "red". Viewed in this light, the linking of names and hairstyles can be seen as possibly other points of confirmation. 

The linking of the hairstyle of Philistines and Fulani would also not be the best indicator of Niger-Congo origins as several groups in Africa still wear the crest-like hairstyles including Rendili in the East and Tuareg also originally linked to the east African area. (Dunn incidently has said he thought the Minoans to be "red men" like a number of Fulani - themselves often called red in Africa" and certain East Africans.)
Nevertheless, such a hairdress probably does testify to African influence in the Mediterranean.

Philistine painted over 3,000 years ago on the Egyptian temple of Medinet-Habu. Philistines were originally semitic peoples who adopted the Aegean dialect and style of dress.

Dunn has also made the interesting point that "Minoan art, with its range of primary colours and decoration based on snakes and cut calabashes, uses numerous symbols of African subject matter." He notes connections between Minoan and African bull cults and jumping, and snake cults. Long ago Sir Arthur Evans noted connections between stone-age Crete and parts of Africa and thought Africans must have settled in southern Crete at one point. Like others he connected the name Pulasati with the Philistines or Pelishtim "the remnant of Kaphtor" and Pelasgians.

Dunn's linking of the name Philistine or Pulasati with that of the Fula or Fulani - also known as Peul, Fellata or Fulbe (who seem to have originally been mentioned as Fulitani in a Roman text in ancient Mauretania Caesaria) - may also have some basis, although it is also possible that the Philistines came directly from the Levant to Crete as semitic-speakers rather than directly from Africa. Keftiu is acknowledged by some scholars as having been at one time the name of the coastal area of the Aegean in general.

Artwork of the Minoans appears to depict more than one African type in Crete among an equally numerous European and long-haired mixed populations. When all points are considered it does seem plausible that one or more groups of Africans including Afro-Asiatics did settle in Crete and parts of the Aegean at one time, as did ancestral Europeans (a brachycephalic and mesocranic population). Judging from the heterogeneous skeletal evidence of the Minoans, the various pastoral African and African-Asiatic groups once present in coastal Syria, Egypt, and Libya appear to have greatly influenced the culture of Crete and the Aegean and contributed to the physical appearance of what look to have been a fundamentally "mulatto" or mixed Afro-European people.

Biases Challenging African Origin Studies?

A hindrance Dunn, himself, perceives as interfering with the resolution of certain linguistic questions of African influences is that "few classicists today know anything about linguistics and linguists have a low opinion of classicists." But he cites still another encumbrance saying, "There is also an anti-African prejudice embedded in the establishment. They do not want an African Classics."  This last suggestion may, nevertheless, very well be a simple and fairly understated way of thinking about the underlying bias extant in Western academics.

                                              

As with Martin Bernal, Dunn in fact surmises a black African substratum that could have carried early Eurasiatic dialects in general across the Mediterranean and feels the early Minoan dialects were just one of the remnants of this once major African presence carried forth in waves in the Aegean and Eurasiatic world. He writes at the end of his paper, Etruscan Decipherment, "Our work proves that Etruscan, like Linear A, is not a language isolate. It belongs to the Niger-Congo family of languages, and is remotely related to Bantu. It proves too that the substrate theorists were right. African substrate existed in the Aegean and Mediterranean from a very early date. This substrate population was known to the Greeks as the Pelasgians. We are now faced with interpreting the Etruscan texts in the light of this important discovery." (See the URL)
http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/gc_dunn/Etruscans.html)

In a 2004 paperback entitled, Comparative Linguistics Indo-European and Niger-Congo, Dunn points out evidence for a linguistic substratum connecting Niger-Congo African dialects with Indo -European, "particularly the Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian complex". He writes, "In our opinion this goes beyond mere influence from a conquered population. This is not confined to lexical borrowing, but involves the phonological system and the morphology."

Dunn's findings are in accord with the genetic evidence of the Mediterranean peoples. Unfortunately, the paper cites some rather controversial and questionable scholarship by Arnaiz -Villena, Gomez-Casado and Martinez-Laso (2002) as well as by others who probably would have best remained unmentioned due to their lack of credentials. The paper by Arnaiz-Villena et al. posits that, based on just HLA genetic alleles, Greeks are closer to Africans than to modern Europeans. The papers authors have suggested Greeks aside from not being closely related to Macedonians "shared an important part of their genetic pool with modern Ethiopians."

Although there is other evidence, aside from HLA traits, of a connection between Greeks and Africans such as the Benin sickle cell trait, the conclusions of the paper of Greeks being more related to Africans than other Europeans have been rejected by some geneticists on the basis of the study's usage of "a single marker". Obviously the phenotype of modern Greeks would also suggest closer relationship to Europeans.

In any case, there are certain other studies that have been done by Loring Brace and others employing analysis of traits proven to be genetic determinants, which purport to show that modern Mediterraneans of southern Europe and North Africa in general are not as closely related to ancient Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Mediterraneans as are modern sub-Saharan Africans and East Africans.  This would probably better explain some of the common genetic traits now shared between Greeks, Sicilians and Africans, etc.

Ancient portrayal of men of the Etruscans

Dunn considers the evidence of the survival in antiquity of a Niger-Congo language on Lemnos that was closely related to Etruscan as more proof of the presence of people of Niger-Congo affiliation in the region. "The shores of the Aegean and Mediterranean therefore were originally occupied by Africans, and subsequently overlaid by Afro-Asiatic farmers. It follows that the Mediterranean was once, in the remote past, the home of African blacks".

A Classicist's Anthropological and Linguistic Explorations: Beginnings

Before his retirement Graham Campbell-Dunn had taught Minoan art and lectured extensively on the classical Greek and Latin languages for 20 years. He had always been fascinated with anthropology and interested in African art and ancient Egyptian culture. This interest began when he was a young child after his mother introduced him to books like, A Thousand Miles up the Nile by English journalist, adventurist, and travel writer Amelia Edwards.

Dunn attended undergraduate school in New Zealand and also obtained a masters degree in classics from Cambridge University. He then received his Ph.D. degree from Canterbury in New Zealand with a focus on Herodotus. He also engaged in post-doctoral studies at Cambridge and learned both Etruscan and African dialects.

A young Campbell-Dunn attends University in New Zealand

It was in the sixties, on a rainy afternoon, that his wife Atenasia showed him a Swahili grammar book her uncle had brought back from Africa, thus he began a rather extensive journey into East African/Bantu linguistics. Along the way he noticed what he and others have felt to be certain clear connections of African dialects with those from regions as geographically distant as Spain, Mesopotamia, Italy, Greece and Polynesia.

Through his studies he was able to work under John Chadwick, author of The Mycenaean World. And study with Robert Coleman. Dunn himself was an early follower of Diedrich Hermann Westermann, an Africanist and linguist, still highly regarded in the field of African linguistics in particular. He is also an admirer of some of the works of Catherine Acholonu-Olumba another fairly controversial researcher who also sees a lot of West African links to early civilizations. According to Dunn, although Westermann used a phonetics that would appear somewhat antiquated today, "he remains the only one that attempted to deal with Niger-Congo as a whole."

"His reputation is therefore still high" comments Dunn. "His work is widely read, in spite of its age. His work does have serious gaps, and does not take sufficient account of loanwords, but his unstarred reconstructions or Stammwrter" are close to real words from a remote period. He was followed by his student the more modern Mukarovsky, who excluded Mande from Niger-Congo, but used more up-to-date phonetics."
Over the years Graham Campbell-Dunn has developed his own answer to such enigmas as the "Sumerian Problem".

"I have looked at Sumerian and can explain all the Sumerian determinatives as Niger-Congo", asserts Dunn. Perhaps a bit naively, he also adds that people "don't seem interested" in his two books on Sumerian. His linguistic analysis and rather widely spread knowledge and interest in ancient archeology and African population movements may allow him to see Sumerian as a derivative of Niger- Congo where other Africanists, more specialized, can't or won't.

Dunn's theories have taken some shots from other up- and-comers. At least one recent and relatively young scholar, a Mark Dingemanse, specialist on Bantu dialects (including Siwu), commenting on a proposed Basque-African connection has referred to Dunn's methods as "crackpot" science, citing what he sees as tendency to "stipulate" without arguing in making his case.

According to Dingemanses critique, some of the invalid methods Dunn (he uses CD for Campbell-Dunn) has employed included, "taking some surface forms from various languages (sometimes even from hypothetic constructed states of protolanguages), and "linking these forms together by making some unqualified and unargued claims about various changes that are needed to link these surface forms visually"

He adds, "What one needs for positing a sound change is evidence from a large number of roots. Only after assembling large lists of potential cognates (a step wholly overlooked by CD there is only one list of 10 items on page 113) can one start to establish regular correspondence sets (another step skipped by CD)." (The parentheses were part of Dingemanses communication with another blogger).

Dr. Dunn in response to some of his critics has expressed the following: "Most of my work is based on root words from Niger-Congo. These are the core of the languages. What happens regarding prefixes, suffixes, etc. becomes irrelevant".

He also comments, "I take the view that Proto-Niger-Congo can be reduced to a list of monosyllabic roots - CV, or CVC. These can be found in a great range of languages by trimming off the prefix(es) or suffix(es). The actual languages are (a) mainly prefixing (b) mainly suffixing. Sumerian seems to undergo the most attrition, but still has the same roots. I am not in the business of combinations. The ideas expressed by the roots often derive from body parts, or actions of these body parts. It seems to me that some modern linguists have lost their way and have become obsessed with perfect proof. This may be achieved after eons of endeavour by millions of linguists. But it is not the world I live in."

Though Dingemanse may look at Dunn's methods as simplistic, Dunn is not the only one, nor anywhere near the first Western or European scholar to propose Sumerian and Elamite correspondences with dialects of the sub-Saharan Bantu. In fact, quite a few early observers would not have thought twice about it.

The First Theorists on a Bantu Substratum in Asia

A Willibald Wanger wrote a book published in 1935 entitled, Comparative Lexical Study of Sumerian and Ntu ( " Bantu " ): Sumerian, the " Sanscrit " of the African Ntu Languages. Dunn notes that Wanger "was trashed by a German reviewer", but believes him to have been on the right path. Also, in the early 1900s a J. Frederik van Oordt stated with some confidence in, The Origin of the Bantu: A Preliminary Study, the following:




I have in the first list given a considerable number of Sumerian words which seem to be immediately connected with Bantu expressions having the same meaning. In the comparative list of Bantu, Indian and Malacca languages, it will be, however, seen that the Sumerian, as an Ugro-Altaic language is derived from the same original stock as Bantu. But there are certain facts which show that the connection between Sumerian and Bantu must have been more close and more direct than would have been the case if only common influences were at work.  Van Oordt evidently conceived of a proto-Negroid or black African substratum stretching from the Malaccas to Africa, but with India as the starting point (an Indian origin of humanity being a not uncommon presumption in that era). In response to this supposition, a William Crabtree in 1918 offered some constructive criticism in a book called Bantu Speech a Philological Study, while at the same time claiming on the basis of his own findings that Bantu may reasonably be claimed to belong to the Ugro-Altaic group". One famed Harry H. Johnston a scientific raciologist, National Geographic contributor and author of the book, The Negro in the New World (a title which speaks for itself), considered Van Oordts proposition "wild theorizing" on the basis of what he claimed were the authors persistent "mixing up Bantu word roots and prefixes. He also thought it was unjustified simply because Bantu has so much in common with other African dialects.
 In more modern times, however, certain linguists of European, African and Dravidian birth have each pointed out what they see as undoubted links between African dialects as well as culture with not only Sumerian, but Elamite and Dravidian dialects.
A Koenraad Elst, in fact, wrote of the still suspected African links to early Dravidian peoples in his text, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate (1999). Some of these correlations between African dialects and Dravidian are unquestionably strong and have been acknowledged not only in the linguistic arena, but in the areas of culture and osteology.

A passage from Elsts Update, for example, speaks of the conclusions of French historian Bernard Sergent, author of Genesis of India (1997). It reads, "Sergent offers the hypothesis that at the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution, some 10,000 years ago, the Dravidians left the Sudan, one band splitting off in Iran to head north to the Urals, the others entering India and moving south.Like others, Sergent suggests that the early Dravidians can be equated with the southern Neolithic of 2500-1600 BC. Their round huts with wooden framework are the direct precursors of contemporary rural Dravidian housing."
In fact physical anthropological evidence does link certain Africans, particularly along the pre-dynastic Nile, to Dravidic speakers and to populations settling in Mesopotamia, Elam and along the Indus as well. 

Sergent himself wrote, "Now, if we recall that the resemblances among Nubians, proto-dynastic Egyptians, Dravidians and what was formerly called Hamites appear henceforth through multivaried cranial measurements as being very evident, and that among the so-called Hamites, the Somalis and Galla are black-skinned, it is probable that the Dravidians have conserved their color on leaving Africa; their installation in the Indian tropical zone could have subsequently only confirmed and augmented this pigmentation." (Le Genese de lInde, 1997, p. 47)

Supporting this view, Elst states, " we have several separate studies by unrelated researchers, using different samples of languages in their observations, and that each of them lists large numbers of similarities, not just in vocabulary, but also in linguistic structure, even in its most intimate features" (Elst, 1999 ) (Some of these researchers in the past include Lilias Homburger, Tidiane Ndiaye and U.P. Upadhyaya and S.P. Upadhyaya).
Elst thought, "the case has been made in most detail for the Senegalo-Guinean languages such as Wolof," however a few other scholars have suggested the Afro-Asiatic linguistic group as a closely linked relative or possibly even linguistic originator of both Dravidian and Elamite. A Czechoslovakian specialist in Afro-Asiatic linguistics, Vaclav Blazek has written extensively about some of these strong lexical connections and has written "The new Dravidian-Afroasiatic lexical parallels in the book Nostratic, Sino- Caucasian, Austric and Amerind.

David MacAlpin wrote about the Elamite-Dravidian connection in articles like "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", in Language 50 (1) published in 1974 (and see also "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology 16 (1), published in 1975).

Dunn has seen the Bantu dialects of Niger-Congo as the most likely candidate for Sumerian, Elamite and Dravidian linguistic origins, like U. P. and S. P. Upadhyaya, authors of the seminal work, "Dravidian and Negro Africaine" published in the International Journal of Dravidian linguistics. The latter found a number of correlations between Bantu dialects and Dravidian.





A simple system of five basic vowels with an opposition short/long, vocalic harmony, absence of consonant clusters in initial position, abundance of geminated consonants, distinction between inclusive and exclusive pronoun in the first person plural, absence of the comparative degree in adjectives, absence of adjectives and adverbs acting as distinct morphological categories, alternation of consonants or augmentation of nouns noted among the nouns of different classes distinction between accomplished and unaccomplished action in the verbal paradigms as opposed to the distinction of time-specific tenses, separate sets of paradigms for the affirmative and negative forms of verbs, the use of reduplicated forms for the emphatic mode, etc. (Elst, p. 47).  The physical anthropological link that bridges these theories is, of course, the African one and it is bolstered by archeological and cultural connections which are, to be sure, too numerous and distinctive to be attributed to a series of population borrowings or commercial exchanges. 
Besides that, there are new theories that suggest a haplotype T in Ydna could be the missing genetic link between African Sahelians, Central East Africans and Dravidians. Buts thats the fodder for another posting.

In addition Mukarovsky, an early student of Westermanns originally proposed there could be a common older linguistic substratum to which both Basque and Hamito-Semitic or the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family had both some connection to. "Assuming genetic relationship between Basque and the Hamito-Semitic family does not however mean that Basque must be affiliated to it. 

Dr. Campbell-Dunn on the other hand takes the plausibility a little further, implying there was anciently a relationship between speakers of dialects in Bantu who may have colonized the Canary islands in ancient times and influenced the region.

Finally Dunn also finds much evidence of a connection to modern Polynesian dialects. He has boldly asserted, "We now have conclusive evidence (basic vocabulary, morphology, sound correspondences) that Maori and the other Malayo-Polynesian languages are African and are related to Bantu and the Niger-Congo group. Bantu kumi "ten", Maori kumi "ten fathoms", Bantu pa "fire", Maori ahi (Malay api) "fire", Bantu N "drink", Maori inu (drink). The Maori singular and plural articles and possessives match singular and plural prefixes (e.g. 5 & 6) in Bantu. Indeed most of the Bantu noun prefixes can be identified in Maori. The following investigation reveals a relationship that envelopes the entire grammatical systems of Maori and Niger-Congo. This cannot be due to chance."

Enter the Rhetoric of the Anti-diffusionist School

One of the drawbacks of current study that individuals such as Dunn and Bernal hold is that most classicists are not aware of the numerous and indubitable evidences linking late Holocene or early pre-Bronze age Eurasiatic populations to black Africans. The fact that most early Eurasiatics might have been a group of African-affiliated peoples present in Europe and Asia before the later spread of the direct ancestors of modern Europeans, has yet to be absorbed mentally by those dealing in subjects outside of the forensic study of ancient Europeans. Thus, the idea of a civilization of African origin that preceded classical civilization runs contrary to the tightly held theories of independent in situ evolution. Yet, it was something even the early physical anthropologists of the colonial period were aware of.

The rather kneejerk and apprehensive reaction to the scholarship of individuals like Dunn and Bernal has its roots in part in anticolonialist historical views. Many of the earliest colonialist historians had the mindset and touted the idea of a hierarchy of "races" and that everything civilized in the world came from Europeans, or else European-related peoples. This led to the emergence of an opposing view that indigenous people could invariably develop things on their own if confronted with similar environmental stimulii and quite similar cultural mores or forms werent necessarily a sign of contact with other groups, even if the cultural forms were identical.

Of course this was true to a certain extent. However, some of the cultural practices of early societies, for instance names in a pantheon of deities, specific burial practices rituals involving cattle, or megalithic construction sites in different parts of the world share similarities or congruences that can not always be easily explained away as parallel independent development a result of similar ecological or environmental stresses.
In the past, instead of acknowledging that people apart from the direct ancestors of Europeans could have built ancient stone age cultures of Europe or Eurasia, they gave anthropological names or typonyms to people associated with these cultures in Africa and Europe that were often euphemisms meant to hide the affiliation of these ancient folk with modern sub-Saharan Africans. The Australian anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith for example, chose the phrase "brown race" for the skeletons associated with megalithic culture in Europe claiming it represented by certain Cushitic types in the Horn and Nubia and separated from the so-called "black race". Guiseppe Sergi and others chose terms like "Eurafrican" or "Mediterranean" or Afro- Mediterranean or simply "hamite" and designated them "Caucasoids" so that anybody living between Tanzania and Scandinavia with a long head or narrow nose (relative to Central Africans could be classified under a single term.

More recently however a trend toward scholarship that is often either politically motivated or else rife with nationalistic biases has been the major impediment to objective scholarship and science which has found early cultures were in many cases not linked to populations that are present today in regions being studied. People have always generally believed themselves to be direct descendants of the lands they occupy. They rarely view themselves as descendants of immigrants, especially if they are in the far distant past.

It is, as usual, up to the more progressive scholar (as it always has been) to keep abreast of the new findings of geneticists and anthropologists who are uncovering once again the Africanness of the Mediterranean, Europe and Eurasia of the late Holocene and early historic periods.

Graham Campbell-Dunn is the author of the following texts:

The African Origins of Classical Civilization, 2008

 

Maori the African Evidence, 2007

Who were the Minoans: An African Answer, 2006

Comparative Linguistics Indo-European and Niger-Congo, 2006 

The African Origins of the Alphabet, 2004

The above can be purchased from his website at the url below:
  http://www.filedby.com/author/graham_campbell_dunn/2342637/works/

Wyatt MacGaffey - Africanist

The Story Behind Dr.Wyatt MacGaffey’s Brilliant Critique – “Concepts of Race in the Historiography of Northeast Africa”

INTERVIEW –

      Approximately 30 years ago the work of a young political anthropologist named Wyatt MacGaffey was published, summarily putting to death one of the most pervasive and pernicious theories ever to plague African studies. MacGaffey, now a retired specialist on Congo religion and society, is still known to pundits of African historiography as one of a few individuals in the European academy attempting to dispel the racialist and racist concept of the “hamite”, cherished in some circles from the colonial period up until the 1980s.

       Although his mission of destroying distortions in the study of African societies was nearly accomplished, the myth has been somewhat revived within the realm of genetic studies and has taken on a life of its own, perhaps mostly among pop culture genetics websites. It has for the most part outrun its course in the American academic scene and among most of Europe’s African studies academic circles, although remnants survive.
        Since retiring from work as a Professor Dr. MacGaffey has spent approximately two months of every year in northern Ghana where his wife has responsibilities.  He has a book about northern Ghanaian kingdoms which is about to come out as well.
        Dr. MacGaffey is married to another devoted Africanist, Dr. Susan Herlin, Professor Emerita of History at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, USA.  She is the Development Chief of Tamale Metropolitan Area in Ghana and has had the honorific title conferred on her of chieftainess or  “Zo-Simli-Naa” for her “tireless efforts for promotion of peace and development in Dagbon, her second home”. She was nominated Dagbon Personality of the Year 2006.

Dr. MacGaffey with wife Dr. Susan Herlin of the University of Kentucky, an honorary chief in Ghana

     

        Dr. MacGaffey, now Professor Emeritus, had taught at Haverford in a Philadelphia suburb in the United States for a good 30 years. Previous to that he had lived in the Congo, particularly between 1964-66, then again during the years 1970 and 1980.  But says MacGaffey, “I have not been back since then. I went there intending to study modern government--a naive project! I was tired of anthropological preoccupations with insignificant problems, and assumed that the ethnography of traditional society had been taken care of by missionary ethnographers. Once there I discovered that that ethnography was mostly nonsense….”

      People interested in the politics of race in African history and colonialist history perhaps know Dr. MacGaffey best for his critique of what is known as “hamitic theory” written over while still a graduate student.  The conceptualization of the “hamite” was sprung from a combination of Biblical studies, scientific raciology and colonialists’ mindset in Africa which essentially held that most of Africa’s cultural legacy and especially everything deemed valuable in it was derived from peoples outside of Africa and from the north. As the theory of race and racial hierarchy was still a staunchly held precept among Western theorists, these imagined “hamites” were usually categorically placed under the typonym of  “Caucasoid”.

      The latter were generally thought to have developed ancient Egyptian civilization and other presumedly more complex civilizations in Africa. It was believed that these northern populations left in their wake many of the peoples of the Horn of Africa extending southward, and others stretching across the Sahara into North Africa, notably the hodgepodge of peoples and cultures viewed as a monolith and named or known as “the Berbers”.

        Again, part and parcel of the concept of the “hamite” was that it was represented by a “Caucasoid”, i.e. European-affiliated population which had turned black as it expanded southward from its presumed Middle Eastern cradle, settling amongst the true blacks or  “sub-Saharans”.  In the minds of many early anthropologists, the complexion of “the Hamite” could vary from region to region. In other words it could be represented by any fair-skinned Afro-Asiatic speaking group in the Maghreb or North of Africa, while in northeastern and central eastern Africa it could be represented by populations that were mostly woolly-haired and near black in color in the east African area.  But generally the complexion of the “hamite” was more commonly described as “dark brown” or “copper brown” as opposed to black.  In fact the anatomist, Grafton Elliot Smith, had judged that such populations should be named “the brown race”.

       It was, in any case, to be distinguished from what was termed the “true Negro”– that idealized notorious icon of early National Geographic photographers i.e. pickanniny, as one of them put it, often found in the backdrop of the 1960s Tarzan television series co-starring “Cheetah” the chimp.

        In “Concepts of Race”, MacGaffey elaborated on the influence of idealism and pseudo-Darwinistic thought which attributed “absolute value” to “Caucasoid” and “Negroid” stereotypes, hypothesizing an unrealistic dichotomy between the two. He wrote, “These absolute values and their relations are treated as social universals, and are believed to be represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man….The pseudo-Darwinian influence is seen in the ranking of the two types and of their attributes. Physically, long heads, aquiline noses, orthognathism and other features are regarded as Caucasoid and as indicating superior capacities.”

      MacGaffey’s piece mentioned H. Junkers article “The First Appearance of the Negroes in History”, published in 1921, which attempted to show Egyptians were of the so-called “hamitic Caucasian” stock and that there neighbors were also not of the “true Negro” sort.  Junker’s presumptions articulated the imagined racial constructs prevalent in the thinking amongst many colonial observers of northeast African populations.

      The so-called “Negro” apparently also varied in its range of phenotype and osteological characteristics depending on the theorist. And, in between the latter and the “hamite” was a “half-hamite” category in which were included peoples as varied as the Watusi, Maasai and Fulani and the Songhai and Hausa, Haratin or Teda.  In Africa, normally everyone possessed of a narrow-nose was generally placed in the category of “hamite” a form of black “Caucasian”, while anyone “ broad-nosed” and “flat nosed” especially if dark-skinned and exhibiting prognathism fell into the “negro” category. In terms of cephalic index, it could typically range in any degree from long-headed to brachycephalic again, depending on the anthropologist or colonialist. In reality the word had as much scientific relevance as the term “coolie” colonialists employed for a caste of then subservient peoples of “the Orient”. 

      MacGaffey also addressed the topic of Sergi and Grafton Elliot Smith’s “brown or Mediterranean race” concept.  He aptly explained that for Sergi only the skull and skeleton could provide systematic indices of race. In Sergi’s scheme blond Nordics and tall Watusi were nonsensically thrown together in some all-inclusive “Eurafrican” category separate from the imagined “true Negro” and so-called “Eurasiatic”.

         Says Dr. MacGaffey “I got into African studies because I studied anthropology at Cambridge, where my teachers included Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody.  Later, while employed by the US government in Washington. I had occasion to read everything about Sudan.”

      As a graduate student at UCLA, some of his instructors were Michael G. Smith, Hilda Kuper and Raymond Mauny.  Michael G. Smith was of Jamaican ancestry and a Social Anthropologist who had done extensive field work in both northern Nigeria and the Caribbean. Hilda Kuper was from Lithuania, a well-known student of the Swazi culture and society of southern Africa.  Raymond Mauny on the other hand, was a Professor of African pre-history from France who had taught at the University of Sorbonne and the University of Dakar in Senegal.  Mauny had written books including  Les siècles obscurs de l'Afrique noire : histoire et archéologie, 1970. ( It is best translated as “The Hidden or Obscure Centuries of Black Africa”.)  He was a well- respected Africanist historian who, nevertheless, is remembered as much for his scathing critique of the views of Senegalese author and scientist Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop.

      Particularly controversial at the time were Diop’s findings about ancient or pharaonic Egyptians. He was a scientist and historian who had also taught at the University of Dakar and who believed ancient and dynastic Egypt was a predominantly “black African” civilization into which some people had entered from the North and settled in relatively small numbers.

     Mauny’s perspective was allied to the “hamitic” theory which apparently included the notion of Africa as a “backward” (apparently Mauny’s word) place, whose peoples had been overrun and civilized from the north by peoples of predominantly southern European or “Caucasoid” Mediterranean affiliation.  By this time the term “hamite” had in fact become ro be the equivalent of the “Mediterranean type”, another vaguely defined population or “race” that could include anything from Nordics to Ugandans thanks to Italian anthropologist Guiseppe Sergi and Carleton S. Coon, (the latter American racial theorist and eugenicist supporter.)

        MacGaffey’s paper wasn’t well- received at first. Although a student of Mauny’s, Macgaffey apparently hadn’t been convinced of everything he had heard with regard to “hamites”.  He explains, “I used my dissatisfaction with what I had read about early Sudan history, combined with what I had learned about genetics from J. B. Birdsell, to write a paper for Mauny which was the first draft of ‘Concepts of race.’ The paper was turned down by “Africa” on the advice of Huntingford, who wrote: ‘Another anti-colonial diatribe. If the author has anything positive to say, you might publish it.’”    

        Despite Huntingford’s disapproval, Roland Oliver, a prolific writer and publisher on things African, “snapped it up”, and it is clear why.

        It is also not surprising that George W. B. Huntingford, who had written much for  the long established British Hakluyt Society would find MacGaffey’s opposition to “hamitic theory” untenable. Huntingford himself had specialized in and lived amongst the people of East Africa and was greatly acquainted with their customs and culture. He had written about ‘hamites’ and “half-hamites” and about  postulated “different mixtures of Negro and hamite” that had supposedly produced the Nilotic and Bantu-speaking peoples. On page 8 of his 1950 publication East African Background he had written of the Baganda, a group -classified by Sergi as an African version of the “Eurafrican Mediterranean race” - and how the latter had helped to civilize Africa, bringing such technologies as ironworking and divine kingship.  The Baganda, wrote Huntingford, “had probably become a tribe about A.D. 1000, and their knowledge of iron came in with their semimythical founder Kintu who was probably a Hamite”.

Such children in southern Ethiopia would not long ago have been classified as "half-hamites"

          
       It was such articulations about an alleged superiority of in-coming “hamites” over African indigenes that perhaps brought MacGaffey’s much cited and vaunted critique, ‘Concepts of Race in the Historiography of Northeast Africa” such attention in the world of African studies.  It probably also assisted Papers in African Prehistory edited by Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage in becoming a classic in its own right, even though some of the work of Oliver himself, along with that of Huntingford, is mentioned in not too flattering a light in the piece.      

     “Concepts of Race” was clearly a comprehensive discourse that rationally-countered  and brilliantly illuminated a host of problematic notions that had been evolving unobstructed in anthropological and racial thinking over years of colonialist writings. As with their many books on Africa, it is much to their credit that the editors of  Papers on the Prehistory of North East Africa, Oliver and J.D. Fage, published the article. It was undoubtedly way ahead of its time, judging from some of the political controversies still swirling around African historiography, genetics, ancient Egypt, “Afrocentrists”  and “Eurocentrists” today. It certainly left little untouched in the way of attacking distorted approaches to thinking about race in Africa.      

        MacGaffey had in fact noted that “the difficulties persist with regard to genetic as well as regard to morphological data…” And for the most part, the dichotomies have been extinguished in arenas of physical anthropology in the West and the U.S.  Nevertheless there is some indication that racial thinking persists in certain schools of genetics in which certain individuals try to project either “Caucasoid” or “Negroid” ideals onto prehistoric peoples dating to as many as 10,000 or even 100,000s of years ago..

        One clear example of the persistence of racial typology and the simplistic way of looking at populations crops up now and then is in a recent genetics paper on the transference of Mtdna which presumes “a race of Caucasians” extant in prehistoric ancient Africa.  The authors state - "Attested presence of Caucasian people in Northern Africa goes up to Paleolithic times. From the archaeological record it has been proposed that, as early as 45,000 years ago (ya), anatomically modern humans, most probably expanded the Aterian stone industry from the Maghrib into most of the Sahara [1]. More evolved skeletal remains indicate that 20,000 years later the Iberomaurusian makers replaced the Aterian culture in the coastal Maghrib”. 

        Clearly one is left wondering what the authors think these supposed “Caucasian” people looked like in what was undoubtedly a tropical region in that period.

         Another indication that the same authors are taking for granted and proposing some revised version of “hamitic theory” is suggested further down where the paper reads surprisingly, "Linguistic research suggests that the Afroasiatic phylum of languages could have originated and extended with these Caucasians, either from the Near East or Eastern Africa,  and that posterior developments of the Capsian Neolithic in the Maghrib might be related to the origin and dispersal of proto-Berber speaking people into the area..."

      It is such misguided retentions of early anthropological notions of  Caucasian “hamites” or  a “brown Mediterranean race” in Africa that probably led to the topic being addressed recently in a paper by two black American scientists Drs. Rick Kittles and Shomarka Keita.  In the paper entitled, “The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence”, published in 1997 by the American Anthropological Association the authors make the following statement -  

There is no need to postulate massive European settler colonization of Africa or genetic swamping and/or settler colonization by Eurasians, as is implied or stated in some contemporary genetic work (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994), echoing the now defunct Hamitic hypothesis.

       The authors also summed up what they see as the continuation of the older racial paradigms in genetics research when it comes to Africa:

It is curious that, although the race concept has largely been rejected, even those in the no-race school have not developed working alternative concepts …Instead, the received racial models and terms are used, sometimes apologetically. Sometimes they are used in an unknowing fashion, while at other times names of continents are used, but the populations or physiognomies deemed representative, or the “true” originals, by various investigators, merely conform to Coon’s (1962, 1965) or C. G. Seligman’s (1930) ideas of original races. This is especially true in the case of Africa. This situation is puzzling.  Are these practices due to methodologies that are inherently typological or to the cultural context of anthropological genetic studies? 

       Whatever the case may be, its not known whether one can look forward to the matter being resolved soon, as some of the assertions still being made by a small number of geneticists are as inherently disturbing as were the original purveyors of “hamitic theory” with its adjoining implications of “racial” and cultural hierarchy.

         Wyatt MacGaffey has a more hopeful view of the matter. “My general sense is that knowledge of genetics is evolving so rapidly that all kinds of classifications and trajectories being announced now will be discarded soon.” 

       One can only hope for the sake of African populations, their cultural heritage and history that he is right. 

*In the late 1990s, Susan Hierlan was also the Executive Producer of a Damba Festival in Louisville, Kentucky which still takes place and features visitors from Ghana and the diaspora.  She has also been “instrumental in the institution of the Tamale Scholarship and Aid Fund; a program that has aided many children through the secondary school system and university in Ghana.”

Parts of the article “Concepts of Race in the Historiography of Northeast Africa” can be found at the url below.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Papers_in_African_Prehistory.html?id=BAo4AAAAIAAJ

Dr. MacGaffey is the author of the following along with numerous other works:

(1962). Cuba: its people, its society, its culture, New Haven HRAF Press.

(1967). Structure and process in a Congo village, University of California.

(1970). Custom and government in the Lower Congo

(1983). Modern Congo prophets: Religion in a plural society

(1991). Art and healing of the Bakongo. Stockholm.

(2000). Congo political culture: The conceptual challenge of the particular, Indiana  

             University Press.

(2010). “The Residue of Colonial Anthropology in the History and Political Discourse of Northern Ghana: Critique and Revision’” Blackwell Publishing Ltd http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00677.x/full