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