| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Impressive, if overly-scholarly work of Afro-centrism; successfully countering the European tendency to speak of civilization as somehow an inherently White characteristic and invention.
Specifically, the book counters the claim made by White Egyptologists since 1830 that ancient Egypt was a White civilization that somehow was not actually in Africa a view that arose to attempt a scientific justification for White imperialism in Africa and the racial exploitation that went along with it. The book thus necessarily charts the movement from an exclusively European Egyptology toward an African one.
The book’s major flaw is that the author conflates the concept of Race with Phenotype - as Whites do - and does not understand why modern biology tries to avoid racial classification because it was misused in the past by White supremacists to justify White supremacy.
However, the author (Cheikh Anta Diop) also shows that Greek civilization owes a substantial debt to Egyptian ideas and accomplishments and that, as Greek ideas of civilization influenced Europe, Egyptian ideas influenced Greece. Scientific racists try to assert that humans became intelligent and civilized only after they left Africa, that Homo sapiens sapiens (The Wisest of the Wise) is indigenous to Europe, but this does not explain the achievements of ancient Egypt, great Zimbabwe nor the Songhay empire.
Unlike most White history and archaeological texts, this book foregrounds its political zeal to abolish the self-defeating obsessions of White supremacy and replace them with a more objective look at the past. One that vindicates Blacks as full members of the human race while never falling into the racial propagandist traps to which White hagiography aspires and simultaneously spends a great deal of time denying. This book is a truly metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political work about the past that few White histories are or ever could be.
This is a rather scholarly and often obscurantist text that is sadly Marxist-influenced. Yet it nails White supremacy and its desire to claim everything worthwhile was invented by Whites right on the head.
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